


In Case of Emergency

by vials



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Not Happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-05-16 08:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14807804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Dear Reader,You are likely searching for something to read and right now there are probably endless options available to you. You could, for example, read something with a happy ending, so you can relax safe in the knowledge that no matter what strife and pain you read about, it will all be alright in the end. Instead you are considering reading this account. Please do not do this.I am sure you have an idea of how the story of the Baudelaire orphans went. I’m sure you have endured enough heartbreak and care not for the altered truths and the parallel stories. I’m sure you don’t want to hear again what happened to Jacques Snicket, or the unknown truth regarding what happened in the days following the incident. Finally, I am certain that if you care anything for Lemony Snicket, you would not want to know a thing about the awful and until now unspoken things that happened to him immediately following the terrible events that befell his brother.The best part is you do not have to. Unless of course, you want to, but I cannot possibly imagine why.





	1. Chapter 1

This is not an easy thing for me to write.

Over the course of somebody’s life, there are often multiple moments that they would perhaps never like to think of again. They would absolutely love to forget all about it, erase it totally from their minds, wipe it from their calendars, and go about the rest of their lives as though nothing happened. Unfortunately at this moment in medical science it is thoroughly impossible to wipe a single moment, and even if that technology was suddenly invented tomorrow it would likely take quite some time before it was safe and trustworthy enough to stick to only a certain time period, rather than erasing everything and causing all kinds of problems. I am quite sure, however, that even with this risk some people would still gladly try it. For example, when I was eleven years old I was subjected to a terrible ski trip during which I learned many important lessons, the clearest of which being that I cannot ski. Upon another ill-fated attempt at this strange sport I found myself being dragged up the mountain by the ski lift which, thanks to my grabbing at it incorrectly, had caught me by a ski and proceeded to drag me halfway up the mountain by my leg as I dangled upside-down, quite frightened and desperately attempting to prevent my ski pants from being tugged any further by the ski lift and exposing my underwear. This is a memory that I have lost many nights of sleep over and indeed still brings heat to my face when I intrusively remember it in the shower; if I could have the opportunity to erase it I would do so in a heartbeat. 

However, that is not what I was referring to when I said that this would not be easy to write – though rest assured, writing that was difficult. The reason that this is so difficult to write is because it involves a lot of unpleasant things, including but not limited to the loss of somebody dear, old grievances and bad blood, a revenge plot that was both impulsive and out of character, not to mention poorly planned, and many other things like great amounts of concern for somebody I respect very much, the constant moral struggle over what constitutes a betrayal, the soaking of a suit that is dry-clean only, and several cheap pudding cups. It is difficult to write because it is a harrowing example of the lengths that we can go to in order to protect ourselves from a truth that we do not want to accept, even if that means going against everything we have believed in our whole lives. It is proof that in times of great personal tragedy it was often be difficult to stay true to one’s moral and philosophical principles. It is a reminder that no matter who we are, the temptation to wipe something from one’s memory can sometimes be too much to resist, and in such cases the truth will always suffer.

My name is Despard Shelley, and when I was much younger than I am now I had the good fortune of meeting a man who devoted his life to the truth. His name, as I soon learned, was Lemony Snicket, and during the years we have spent together, beginning when I was a new and impressionable volunteer, he has constantly emphasised the importance of his morals to me, engraining them irreversibly into my development as a person and as a volunteer. He has often told me that the pursuit of truth is both an honourable and a dangerous thing, that it is a great risk to go after the truth in a world filled with corruption and arrogance, but for as long as I have known him he has never allowed such a risk to stop him. Over the years I have been many things to Lemony – his apprentice, his colleague, his accomplice in crimes both committed and accused, his chef, his companion, the rear end of a horse costume we were once forced to wear as a disguise, his editor, his administrative assistant, and depending on who you ask, his murderer. Of all of these things I mostly consider myself his friend, even if I feel my actions are currently incompatible with such a claim. 

For many years Lemony Snicket has been painstakingly chronicling the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and his research has always been as thorough as it was miserable. I have held both his manuscripts and my own tongue for some time, but recently it has become undeniable that his research has become something else: inaccurate. This was not a conclusion I wished to reach, but being responsible for the coherency and assured accuracy of the Baudelaire story it was something that I could not ignore. At first my major concern was that I was being contacted by an imposter, as the voice in the letters and annotations was alien to me, and the manuscripts were thrown together with a haphazardness I would never have expected from my old friend. I tried everything I could to come up with a plausible explanation, but all my investigations into the risk of an imposter came up with nothing. Eventually I had no choice but to accept that the inaccuracies were deliberate: that despite Lemony’s constant search for the truth, something was causing him to betray himself and record lies. 

We are all guilty of lies on occasion, and before I go forward I have to come clean about something that both Lemony and I share responsibility for. Since the beginning of this investigation it has been implied that the research has been occurring many years after the events they describe, but that is a lie created for both security and future deniability. By the time I organise this research into published volumes many years would have indeed passed, but at the time of writing this – and the time of the research – the events are still fresh. The lives of the Baudelaire orphans have at times come incredibly close to Lemony and by extension myself; during some occasions, they have crossed over. In the ever more critical pursuit of the truth, the idea that we are all separate is the first myth that has to go.

So what has caused my long-time friend, my mentor, the man who taught me everything I know about truth and writing and honest investigations and horse disguises, to scorn the truth and create a false narrative around his life’s work? It was so uncharacteristic of him that I had no idea where to begin; it was sickening to think that it was something he had chosen to do. As it turns out, sometimes the most unpleasant of thoughts are the ones that shed some light onto a situation. The thought did not settle right in my head. The implication that he had chosen to do such a thing seemed like a disservice, and guiltily I realised that there had to be a reason for it – a reason outside of his control. A reason I would only discover if I did some research of my own. 

With great regret I had no choice to turn everything he had taught me against him. I found myself tailing the man who had taught me the very basics of how to do such a thing, and my research lead me to the worst possible outcome for one’s suspicions: the realisation that they were correct. Something had indeed occurred that was outside of his control, something so painful and wretched that it had corrupted his most precious of principles and caused him to compromise everything he had been working towards for years now. While I sincerely hope that this account of mine will never have to be used, and that after the required amount of time to process what happened and cope with it my friend will correct the damage for himself, I am also aware that there is a time to hope and there is a time to act. The man I know would want me to act. It is better to prevent a fire than to struggle to put it out.

The truth is thus: something other than what was outlined to me occurred in the Village of Fowl Devotees, something that lead to events much more terrible than the ones presented as the truth. The reason for this obscurity is, I presume, the sincere need to alter one’s personal truth to protect oneself from harm, in this case mental and legal. The following account, painful though it has been, is in its own wicked way a tribute to the man now creating its necessity in the first place – the one who, I have no doubt, would have laid down his life for the truth. 

I have always been taught that it is common decency to warn somebody of unpleasant revelations. Upon bad news – which in the lives of Lemony and I occurred often and with little warning – he would always inform me that he had bad news, and wait for me to ask what it was before telling me. I therefore had the choice of not knowing, but while this might be preferable for some people it was not preferable or practical for me, for if I didn’t ask for the bad news in question I would have often found myself in inexplicable and confusing situations, such as hiding in a large box and being loaded onto the back of a truck, or the heinous crime of declaring that there was a fire when in actual fact there was not. However, the point remained impressed upon me that it is nice to give a warning, and therefore, this is yours.

This is not a happy story, but you do not have to read it. I urge you, please: look away now.


	2. Chapter 2

This dreadfully unhappy tale begins on what was an admittedly beautiful night, clear skies and plenty of moonlight. To look in three directions gave the distinct impression that one was miles away from anything, and in most cases that would be true for the area. However, looking in the fourth direction would reveal a small village, clustered together and huddled close like prey animals sheltering from the predatory night. Indeed this might not have been far from the truth, considering the Hinterlands’ reputation for roving packs of carnivorous beasts, but that particular dreadfully unhappy tale is for another day. 

The night would have been peaceful, Lemony thought, if not for the strange atmosphere that being simultaneously close to civilisation yet still completely out of reach brings. It was, he thought, almost like being adrift in the ocean, too far for anyone to reach should something go wrong but close enough to feel exceptionally cruel if one began drowning; a distance that looked as though it should be easy to swim to, or at least call to, but in reality might as well not be there at all. Sometimes to see a solution just out of reach while in the midst of a problem is worse than seeing no solution at all, though of course as he considered these thoughts Lemony was highly mistaken in his casting of the town as the solution to any problems at all. 

It is unwise to arrive into a small town in the middle of the night, as such a thing creates no end of suspicion, but perhaps if Lemony had decided to do so anyway he might have managed to avoid the entire sorry mess. As it happened he did not enter the Village of Fowl Devotees that night and decided to wait until the morning, but in a place so barren it would be difficult to find somewhere out of the way to camp for the night. With the moon so bright and the ground so flat a tent would stand out like a sore thumb, a strange phrase meaning _draw immediate attention and most likely suspicion_ , and any camp fire would be seen for miles around. The flat ground and the visibility it provided would indeed be a problem, Lemony knew, and in fact no sooner had the thought crossed his mind did he become aware of headlights heading straight for him.

When an area of land is large and flat, it can be difficult to predict how fast a moving object is approaching. The reason for this is that there is nothing to compare it to, and it is the same reason why travelling on a plane always feels so slow. It isn’t until you have a reference point for your speed – such as cities below – that you realise that in actual fact you are likely travelling in excess of five hundred miles per hour. The same thing can happen on the ground, for example, with a vast expanse of dust and grass and a speeding taxi that looks incredibly, incredibly familiar. The speed at which the vehicle is travelling is impossible to predict and the chain of events its appearance is about to set off equally unpredictable, though Lemony was initially far too concerned with trying to hide anyway. All of this was, of course, only considered when it became abundantly clear that there was nowhere to hide, and even if there had been the vehicle was travelling far too quickly – so quickly, in fact, that when the driver slammed on their breaks, no doubt alarmed at seeing a lone traveller all the way out there at that time, the taxi slid a fair distance down the road before finally coming to a stop. 

By this point, Lemony had identified the vehicle as none other than his brother’s taxi, and so it was with much confusion and more than a little disappointment that it was not his brother climbing out of the taxi with an expression of equal confusion but a young woman instead. She took a few steps closer, paused, glanced back at the vehicle, and then took several more steps closer, the whole while staring at Lemony as though she might have seen a ghost. Lemony, for his part, didn’t help the illusion, as down to confusion or disappointment or simply surprise, he remained rooted to the spot, making no attempt to explain why he was out in such a remote location on his own, with no apparent explanation as to how he got there.

She spoke when they were within throwing distance of one another, still looking at him as though she couldn’t quite work out what she was seeing. 

“I could have sworn you were Jacques,” she said, with the tone of somebody who still wasn’t entirely convinced they were wrong.

“I’m not,” replied Lemony.

“You look like him.”

“I have heard this before, actually.”

“You look a lot like him.”

“You know him?”

“Yes. I work with him.”

“Is this a new development?”

“Relatively, yes. You work with him too?”

“I’m his brother.”

“He did say he had a brother.”

“He does.”

“He said you were dead.”

“I’m not.”

“I can see that.”

She stepped a little closer, unfolding her arms and smiling, her expression warm. Ordinarily a meeting between two strangers in the middle of the night on a desolate and unforgiving wasteland would be rife with suspicion, but very often the invisible presence of a mutual acquaintance can ease such worries, especially when you are both very fond of the person and even more so when you each recognise something very specific on one another, such as an appearance confirming the shared genetics of the person you are fond of or the glint in the eyes of only the most noble of volunteers.

“Olivia Caliban, librarian,” Olivia said, holding out her hand. 

“Lemony Snicket, fugitive,” Lemony replied, shaking it. 

“How does that pay?”

“Terribly. What about you?”

“Arguably worse.”

“Understandable. Where’s Jacques?”

Her face darkened. “He’s in the village. The whole town believes him to be a terrible villain called Count Olaf and they’re burning him at the stake tomorrow morning.”

“Well, he’s been in worse scrapes than that.”

“It’s still rather complicated.”

“Of course.”

“We managed to escape from prison, obviously, or I wouldn’t be standing here, and he stayed behind to keep an eye on the children.”

“The Baudelaires?” 

“Yes. And the Quagmires, if we can find them. I’m sure you’ve seen the news.”

“He’s on his own?”

“He’s more than capable.”

There were many things that Lemony wanted to say to that. He wanted to reassure Olivia that he wasn’t doubting his brother’s abilities for a moment. He wanted to outline that it wasn’t Jacques that he was worried about, but rather Olaf, who he knew much better than Olivia and in some respects, perhaps better than Jacques. He wanted to explain in detail to Olivia just what kind of a man Olaf was when somebody got in his way, and he wanted to explain that Jacques’ only flaw was that he was too good, too forgiving, that he saw the best in everyone especially when they were old friends. It was an admirable trait but a dangerous one, and in such a situation it was perhaps the worst possible combination. There was no time, however, to say any of those things – usually just too late to intervene, sometimes by mere hours, Lemony couldn’t bear to let the opportunity slip through his fingers. Instead, he replied with the closest summary of the situation he could manage.

“I trust my brother completely, but that includes trusting him to be himself.”

They decided to stick to the original plan, or rather, the plan as it had been before Lemony’s surprise arrival, by which I mean Olivia continued on her journey with the addition of everything Lemony carried on him that he no longer felt he needed, and Lemony abandoned his plan not to go with her but to instead head for the village. Why he decided to travel so lightly in unknown, but it could he assumed that considering all of the unspoken things he had thought seconds before, he perhaps knew that the outcome of whatever happened in that village would make travelling lightly – and therefore quickly – a necessity. 

Another strange thing about vast, open spaces is that it’s impossible to tell how far a distance is. Something that seems close by can in actual fact be dozens of miles away, and in a strange inversion of this effect things can appear to be very far away until quite suddenly they’re upon you. For an hour it was the former that was the case for Lemony, and then quite suddenly, before he had the chance to really commit to any kind of plan, it was the latter. For a moment his lack of plan seemed overwhelming, like a sudden conversation one hadn’t predicted or prepared for and found at the last moment that the conversation was with a very important person, such as a boss or somebody accusing you of committing a crime and demanding you defend yourself there and then. Perhaps if the village had been larger he would have stolen away for a few moments to check out the area and formulate a lose plan, even if it were only an escape one, but the Village of Fowl Devotees has far more crows than people and consists of only a few rows of houses and a cluster of buildings passing for a town square. Upon arriving, as Lemony did, in the middle of the town, it would be clear to see if anywhere should demand immediate attention, and that was why instead of taking a moment to gather his thoughts Lemony instead found himself drawn to one building in particular. 

Lemony had seen the building before, though it wasn’t the reason he was drawn to it that night. The reason he was drawn to it was because he knew that the building had been long abandoned, but having been in many long abandoned buildings in his time he knew that they have a certain feel to them that recently occupied buildings do not. He once explained it to me as a sense of loss, perhaps a loss of purpose – we design buildings with a specific function, and when they have ceased to perform this function, there is an undeniable oddness around their atmosphere. They seem, I think he wanted to say, lonely. 

The building had once been a firehouse and it had once been a tavern and now it was neither, thanks to village rules banning several things of which this is not an exhaustive list by any means: particular beverages, pouring of several other beverages, bar stools, use of mechanical devices including fire trucks, the sliding down of fireman’s poles, and in their most decisive move, fires altogether. This of course negated the need for either service, which here means _the firehouse was no longer needed because fires had been banned_ and also _the tavern was not populated even by the most daring of villagers because there was nowhere to sit_ , and the building had since fallen into disrepair. It was this building that should have felt lonely, then; this building that should have felt empty and without purpose, but for somebody who knew what they were looking for it was apparent that this was not the case.

There were footprints in the dusty ground around the tavern’s swing doors, and, imprinted on the line of dust at the top of the door, marks that suggested fingerprints. There was less dust floating in the air inside than one would have expected, as though an attempt had been recently made to clean the place up a little, and inside were several things that were entirely out of place. There were piles of clothing, quickly discarded, in a corner beside the bar. There was an old firehose unrolled and laying haphazardly across the floor. There was a tall statue of a red herring standing slightly taller than an average twelve-year-old child. There was a heavy book of rules next to the fireman’s pole with a large dent in its binding that implied it had fallen from a height. There was a discarded crowbar with what looked dreadfully and unpleasantly like blood coating one end of it. And there was, I am very sorry to say, a terribly injured man laying not far from those final two objects. 

When faced with a scene of unimaginable horror, it is very common to feel detached from oneself. Lemony was no exception as he forced his suddenly unsteady legs to bring him closer, and the entire time he found himself fighting against the evidence that was clearly in front of him. It must be a mistake, or it must be somebody else, or perhaps it’s wasn’t as bad as it looked. The unfortunate truth is that it was exactly what he feared, and it wasn’t somebody else, and it was as bad as it looked – in fact, the closer he got the worse it looked, because from the door and in the gloom Lemony hadn’t been able to see the amount of blood surrounding his brother, but now he could. The sight of blood often makes something suddenly and undeniably real, and combined with the memory of everything he had wanted to say earlier, Lemony was faced with perhaps one of the worst situations a person can experience: the realisation that your very worst fears have come true.

“Jacques.” He spoke quietly, kneeling on the ground beside him and trying to ignore the dampness soaking into the knees of his trousers. “Jacques.”

He felt he should say something else, ask if his brother could hear him, perhaps, or tell him that it would be alright, but the words wouldn’t come. They stuck in his throat, caught there by the fear that Jacques wouldn’t be able to hear him, or perhaps by the realisation that it would be a lie to tell him that it was going to be alright because it was quite clearly the furthest from alright that it could possibly be. He found himself temporarily incapable of speech but he was at least able to reach over and search for a pulse in his brother’s neck, needing to know the answer to the most pressing of questions before anything else. The blood had made its way down Jacques’ neck and soaked into the fabric of the shirt he was wearing; it was cool and thick and Lemony realised, with a jolt of unpleasant realisation, that Jacques had been there for some time. 

Perhaps the only good news about this scene is that then, at least, Jacques was still alive. In times of great trouble people often find their priorities rearranging themselves: for example, upon discovering that his brother was in fact alive Lemony was not in the least bit concerned about how he would get him help in such a hostile place, nor was he worried about the undeniable fact that the two of them were still certainly surrounded by enemies. All that mattered was that there was a chance, however slim, and Lemony knew all too well that the slimmest chance was always better than no chance at all. 

“Jacques.” For a moment it seemed to still be all Lemony could say, then, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

He didn’t feel as though that was a lie. One way or another he would manage it. He had seen several possibilities already, not least of which the fire truck still parked at the side of the building. If he could get it running they might stand a chance, but the first problem would be moving Jacques in the first place. Could it be possible that moving him could cause more harm? Looking at him, Lemony didn’t think such a thing was possible. 

It is a terrible thing to see somebody you love dearly so gravely injured, made even worse by certain factors, such as the fact that you haven’t seen them for many, many years and during those years they have believed you dead. It’s especially upsetting when the person who has been injured is also somebody you look up to very much, a person who you believed, somewhere deep and perhaps unacknowledged in your mind, was invincible. Most people have to experience the harrowing realisation that their parents, for example, are simply regular human beings who make mistakes and have terrible qualities they must keep in check; they are not these untouchable figures who know everything and can never die. It is a normal part of life but such an association does not have to apply only to parents. If you were, for example, an orphan whose parents died when you were still very young and you found yourself cast adrift with only your elder twin siblings to look after you, this association might in fact imprint itself upon them instead, and you may then have the unpleasant realisation that say, your brother, is completely human when you find him bleeding heavily from severe head wounds on a dusty tavern floor. Whatever the situation it is bound to be jarring and in some cases traumatising, and such a thing is made no easier when it suddenly dawns upon you that this person is suddenly aware of what is going on, or as aware as they can be, and is looking at you with the kind of desperation and hope that comes from the genuine belief that you might be able to fix it. When you are used to being the one expressing that hope and find yourself suddenly on the receiving end, it can feel as though your entire life is a lie.

This was exactly was Lemony was feeling as he realised his brother was looking at him. He was dazed, his eyes unfocused, but there was no denying the fact that he was at least aware of what was going on – when Lemony moved to the side slightly, Jacques’ eyes, unsteadily and slowly, followed him.

“Lemony.”

It had been so long since he had heard his brother say his name that he found he had almost forgotten what it sounded like. He wanted to cry, but already he found himself adopting the role assigned to him by that look: he could not. He was supposed to make everything alright. 

“Lemony.” Jacques’ voice was weak, his words slurred, but unbelievably he managed a smile. “I thought you were dead. You are, aren’t you?”

It was a complicated story, one that was far too complicated to explain to somebody in Jacques’ state. Thankfully Lemony wasn’t expected to try and explain, because before he could even begin to think of something simple to say Jacques had spoken again. 

“I never really believed in all of that stuff, you know,” he said, and his eyes slipped closed again before he twitched, opening them as though waking himself from falling asleep. “About seeing ghosts before you die, and all of that.”

“You’re not going to die,” Lemony said firmly, though his throat was tight and he knew he was saying the words more for his benefit. 

“But here you are,” Jacques continued, as though he hadn’t heard him, and perhaps he hadn’t. “Unless you’re alive, of course, but that would be a very strange coincidence.”

“You’re not going to die,” Lemony said again. “I’ll get you out of here, and I can explain later.”

Could he explain? For a moment he was faced with the horrible realisation that really, after ensuring that Jacques was safe, he would have to vanish again. Jacques would likely believe the entire encounter to be a hallucination or a dream by the time he was well enough to think about it clearly, if he remembered it at all. The thought was as devastating as it was comforting – a moment that would be completely deniable eventually, but with the expense of lying to Jacques, of actively forcing him to believe he was dead rather than take advantage of an incredibly convoluted sequence of events. 

“We looked all over for you, you know,” Jacques mumbled, as Lemony straightened up slightly, looking around for anything that could help him move Jacques while causing as little discomfort as possible. “But there was no trace. Kit was worried you were dead first, but I remember you were always good at hiding. Remember how Mother and Father used to panic all the time, because you would just vanish?”

The memories were like shards of glass but Lemony knew keeping him talking would be the better option. “I remember. They had to get an entire museum locked down once. Do you remember that?”

“You were hiding under the dresses in one of the displays,” Jacques said, and his smile seemed increasingly more distant, his voice less and less like himself. “We couldn’t get up to anything, you know, because you might be hiding somewhere, a constant witness. No wonder they snapped you up. Those observation skills, you didn’t miss a thing.”

“I missed this,” Lemony said, before he could stop himself. “I missed the fact you were in danger even though I was close enough to help. Despite all my research, despite those observational skills, I still managed to miss you were here. I still missed the opportunity to—to—”

He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. He broke off, looking around, still trying to think, but it wasn’t easy to focus. 

“I’m sorry, Jacques,” he added, the words sounding suddenly weak, too little for what he was trying to say, for everything he was trying to apologise for. 

“Why?” Jacques looked so genuinely confused that Lemony could barely stand to look at him. He didn’t deserve whatever it was on Jacques’ face – understanding, forgiveness, love. He felt unworthy of it all.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, shaking his head. “Listen, I need to get you out of here. Maybe I can make some kind of stretcher out of something… I don’t want to move you too much.”

“If we’re doing apologies,” Jacques said, as Lemony straightened up, eyeing the fire hose. Perhaps he could use it to secure Jacques somehow? “There’s some things I don’t want to bring to the afterlife with me, if such a place exists.”

“Oh?” Lemony didn’t feel like encouraging his brother’s deathbed confessions but he had to keep him talking. “Jacques, I’m not being funny, but I don’t think you’ve done a thing you need to apologise for in your life.”

Jacques laughed, then coughed, then groaned. Lemony turned to him, alarmed, but saw he was still conscious, still as focused as he could be. “That’s sweet of you. You always thought the best of me.”

“And you of me,” Lemony said, and his throat felt tight again.

“Remember the first time we were left home alone?”

“I remember.” It wasn’t the kind of thing Lemony thought he could ever forget. He quickly crossed the room, gathering the hose. It seemed sturdy. 

“And you got so angry at me because you thought I was keeping a secret?”

“I’m sure it was nothing,” Lemony replied, suddenly gripped by an irrational idea that if he didn’t let Jacques confess anything, he couldn’t possibly die. Such irrational bargains are often conjured up in times of great risk, but very rarely are they binding. Lemony was all too aware of this, and the realisation he was desperate enough to try anyway terrified him.

“You asked me about it again when we were older,” Jacques said, laughing, and the laughter sounded weaker now. “What was it you said?”

Lemony winced. “Something about never wanting to be in a situation where my main goal was to make people think I’d pooped myself, I think.”

“Yeah, that was it.” Another laugh, and a cough that sounded terribly wet. “I panicked, you know? Cover stories, they’re difficult sometimes.”

“Still. It was quite the sacrifice. I don’t think Kit ever stopped teasing you.”

“She didn’t, actually. Still does. She misses you.”

Lemony froze, his shoulders tense. Thankfully he wasn’t expected to answer that, either.

“Looking back it doesn’t seem so bad now. I suppose at the time I had a drastically different idea of what would get me into trouble.”

“I’m sure it was nothing, Jacques.”

He carried the hose back, setting it on the ground and looking for something sharp. The only obvious place to check was behind the bar, where he found a small knife likely left for carving fruit. It would take a while with the tough, thick material of the hose, but what other choice did Lemony have? He brought it back and crouched down again, working as quickly as possible. 

“You have to understand that there was something very compelling at work if I was willing to smuggle out some bedsheets and imply—”

“I know, Jacques.”

“You don’t know. I can’t take this with me to the afterlife.”

“You can tell me in the afterlife.”

It was a low blow, Lemony thought, but not the lowest. Either Jacques would continue believing that Lemony was dead and no harm would be done, or he would forget about it entirely. He didn’t want to consider a third option, where Jacques would die and find himself looking for his younger brother without luck in that world, too. The thought made his breath catch in his throat and he bent his head, focusing on the hose. 

“No, _listen_ ,” Jacques mumbled, and Lemony looked up, alarmed. His brother’s voice had become suddenly weak, sounding so unlike him that he had to look to make sure it was really Jacques who had spoken.

“Jacques—”

“Listen,” Jacques mumbled again, and his hand found the front of Lemony’s shirt, unexpectedly strong. His fingers left smears of blood on the fabric – blood that I remember seeing for myself upon seeing Lemony again, not so long after this incident but certainly long enough that it was odd he should still be wearing such a thing. 

“I’m listening,” Lemony said quietly, and for a moment they looked at one another.

It is strange, how quickly catastrophic things can happen. One moment we can be in an ordinary situation and find it becomes suddenly abnormal; other times we can be in an abnormal situation and find it gets suddenly worse, worse than we could ever imagine. Such was the case then: one moment, Lemony was looking into his brother’s face, for a brief and wonderful second so familiar despite the blood that he could believe he might make it; the next something had changed so terribly and so completely that no words could ever describe it in a way that did it justice, if such a thing could ever be associated with the word justice.

The simple fact of the matter was that Lemony knew, undeniably and devastatingly, that one moment he had been crouched on a tavern floor with his brother, and the next he was simply crouched on a tavern floor.


	3. Chapter 3

L,

I’m unsure if this will find you. I am of course used to you vanishing for long periods of time but there’s usually more correspondence than this. In comparison to other disappearances of yours this has been relatively short – only a few days since you failed to check in – but I have some concerns I thought I had better make clear now, while the days are still early enough that I might be of some assistance.

  1. You were supposed to check in three days ago by way of a parcel containing the latest documents you wished to send me. These were important and I know you wouldn’t fail to get them to me, however it does not seem to be you who sent them. The address is written in your handwriting but the post mark is from somewhere different. Also I received a note on the same day from someone else calling themselves only O, who mentioned that they had been asked by you to send it in your place. This person claims you are safe but gave no further details.
  2. Your work, when I examined it, appears to be interrupted. It is unlike you to leave things unfinished. It seems you had to leave it in a hurry and have it send to me despite its being incomplete. I am of course doing my best to fill in the blanks and I hope that you simply met one of the usual but no less inconvenient interruptions, but combined with O’s interference this is alarming.
  3. There is no accompanying note giving me even a general idea of your next general location. I have tried all the usual codes and some of our own and found nothing.
  4. I have heard bad news.



I don’t wish to corner you with a discussion about such a thing if you are trying to see to things yourself, as is understandable, but I did want to send a note to acknowledge it. Words could never do justice to what you must be experiencing, and I know that the incident that occurred in that village has sent shockwaves through all of us. Despite our estranged relationship with the rest of our organisation you know me well enough to know that I have ears on the ground, and this is how I discovered this news. I don’t expect you wish to talk about it and I don’t want to force you to do so, so take this as a note to inform you that I already know and no explanation is required. All I ask is that you continue to contact me if you need any assistance, as usual. I am concerned about the sudden erratic behaviour, though I suppose given the circumstances it’s understandable.

You have always been a great comfort to me in times of loss and upheaval, and I hope you remember at least some of what you have taught me. The world is a cold and often cruel place and very often we cannot hope to make sense of the things we are put through, and when such things happen it seems almost pointless to try and put words to them. Just know that I am so very desperately sorry. I have not seen J for some time and my memories of him are all from when I was much younger, but I do know that my sister F trained under him and I’m sure you know of her reputation within our organisation – it is often brought up that she is a credit to him. There are so many people out there who are ready and willing to continue his legacy. Such is the nature of what we do – when one person is no longer able, others will take their place. It is how we survive.

Perhaps these words are doing nothing but compounding the pain. I hope not. If they are, I hope that in time you can look back on them with comfort and pride. Please do not forget yourself out there, and if the world ever becomes too loud, know that you can always find me. The word is quiet here.

– D


	4. Chapter 4

The immediate aftermath of such horrible events are never entirely clear. Everything seems to occur in a blur, even if the person in question felt as though they were in control the entire time. Lemony would never say that he was totally in control but he knew he had managed to organise something, because when he woke up in the back of his brother’s taxi less than twenty-four hours later the incident had been smoothed over as much as possible – Count Olaf, regrettably, was not as dead as the papers were still reporting but at least he hadn’t had the satisfaction of taking Jacques’ identity forever, not after a few well-placed calls and Olivia’s incredible foresight. She hadn’t gone far after all, and had instead been perfectly placed to help, though Lemony had forgotten a lot of the specifics. She was on her way to her original location now, and Lemony, who had needed to get out of that village and preferably never look at it again, had come with her. 

He had sat in the back and she had glanced at him as the taxi pulled away, and it was only afterwards that Lemony realised how it must look. He had no idea of the blood that was covering him, coated over his hands, smeared on his face, staining the collar and cuffs of his clothing. 

“What happened?” Olivia asked quietly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know, but the little she had seen – and all the unanswered questions it caused – were too much when combined with this tired man covered in blood. “I mean… is it… is he..?”

“I’m sorry,” Lemony said, numb, and slumped back in the seat. “There’s nothing—it was—I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain. It’s just—”

“It’s bad.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” It was her turn to say it. Now both of them knew how ridiculous it sounded in the face of everything that had happened. 

They didn’t say anything else for a long while. At some point, having had no sleep for almost two days, Lemony must have slept. He couldn’t remember falling asleep but he must have done, because quite suddenly he was awake again, leaning against the door with his jacket tucked over him and a sharp ache in his neck.

“You’re awake.”

How strange it was to see somebody else driving. In all his years Lemony only remembered his brother behind the wheel, with a few exceptions where it was Kit and, once, himself. There is something undeniably cruel about seeing something that should be familiar changed in some seemingly insignificant way – to anybody else it would simply be a case of a different driver, but of course to Lemony it represented so much more than that. It often feels silly, to get so upset over something that many people would agree doesn’t matter, but those people never know the full story and they are also much more eager to tell you not to be upset than to listen to the reasons why you are.

Olivia, as Lemony quickly found out, was a highly perceptive woman with a great amount of emotional intelligence; she had picked up on what he was thinking even before he had, and when he sat up a little straighter and shrugged off the jacket he had covered himself with he saw she was glancing at him in the rear view mirror with an expression of nervous sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking back to the road. “I feel as though I’m intruding. This taxi is more yours than mine.”

Lemony shook his head. “No. He gave it to you. It’s yours.”

Conversation after such a terrible experience is always difficult, but made all the more so when it is trying to occur between two people who are essentially strangers. Lemony was far too aware that the last Olivia had heard of him, he was dead, and Olivia was all too aware of the fact that nobody who is believed dead got there through normal or respectable means. The parallel of Count Olaf’s apparent death only underlined this further. 

“I must look very suspicious to you,” Lemony eventually said.

“Well, it’s not normal,” Olivia conceded, “but Jacques spoke highly of you.”

“He—” His throat was suddenly tight again. He cleared it, hoping to try again, but no words would come.

“You seem surprised.”

“I didn’t think—” He cleared his throat again, taking a steadying breath. “I didn’t think he spoke of me.”

“You’re his brother.”

“And I’ve been gone for a very long time.”

“So will you stop talking about Jacques in a few years?” She looked at him in the rear view mirror again, eyebrows raised.

“That’s different,” Lemony said helplessly.

“I don’t see how.”

“It’s easier to speak highly of Jacques.”

“Well, he found it very easy to talk highly of you. I wouldn’t be driving across the Hinterlands with a complete stranger if he hadn’t come highly recommended.”

There are plenty of awkward situations to find oneself in, but perhaps none quite as specific or as uncomfortable as hearing your praises sang when you don’t feel as though you deserve them. It was something that Lemony was no stranger to, but despite his years of practise in the matter he still found himself woefully ill-prepared for them, never quite knowing how to react. To be gracious in an attempt to end the conversation quicker always left him feeling like a fraud; to deny it and outline all of the reasons why he disagreed could end in an even more uncomfortable situation at best, and involvement of the law at worst. Of all the places to be stuck in such a situation, a cramped space – such as a taxi, a broken elevator, or a two-person horse costume – is probably the worst, because it means no quick escape. 

“I’m touched to hear that,” Lemony eventually settled on, though it was impossible to keep the flatness from his voice. Olivia glanced at him again, concerned, but the one advantage of having gone through something like what Lemony had recently experienced is that any odd behaviour is merely attributed to the shock, grief, or emotional exhaustion that comes with it. Perhaps this was why Lemony was able to get away with saying nothing more than that, or perhaps Olivia, with the gift that some people seem to have inherently, simply knew that any questions she could ask were not ones she wanted answers to – at least, not while alone in the Hinterlands. 

They had driven for a while in silence before Lemony spoke again, leaning forward slightly in the way people do when they have something urgent to say.

“I would prefer it,” he said, not bothering to try and introduce the topic, “if you didn’t mention that you had seen me.”

For the first time, a flicker of suspicion crossed her face. “Why not? Surely the fact you’re alive is a good thing?”

“What is good news for one person can be catastrophic news for another,” Lemony replied, not bothering to get into the fact that he severely doubted anybody would regard his being alive as good news. “I would appreciate it if I didn’t have to find out which.”

“You’ve been alive all this time.”

“Considering I am still alive now, I should hope so.”

“But nobody knows?”

“Not that I’m aware of, though I’m sure some people suspect.”

“But what would force a person to let their family believe that—”

Lemony would have loved to point out that it hadn’t been his first choice, nor what he had ever envisioned for himself, but everything seemed to complicated to articulate. When someone has been through something emotionally taxing they often find it difficult to do the simplest of things, such as hold a conversation or cook for themselves. It is the reason that people bring around hot dishes to houses that have suffered a bereavement, or why the neighbours sprayed my sisters and I with their garden hose every day when our parents were dealing with the funeral of our mother’s father and were too busy and distraught to make sure we were taking our nightly baths, although with hindsight that could have simply been because our neighbour was a strange and grouchy old man, and may have perceived us to be on his property. What I am trying to say, of course, is that usually Lemony was a man who was very good with his words and quick to think thing up on the fly, thinking of plausible stories on the spot and with no hesitation, but due to the emotional toll that last twenty-four hours had taken on him he found himself totally incapable of doing such a thing right then, or of bearing the weight of what Olivia was saying. In the end, there was only one word he could say.

“Don’t.”

He sounded nothing like himself when he said it. 

The passing of scenery is often a calming thing to watch; whether it is from a car or a train or a gap in the siding of a cargo truck you have concealed yourself in, it can be mesmerising and useful for taking your mind off of things. It can also be a comfort, especially during times of stress, because passing scenery means you are moving, and when you are moving your brain cannot help but think that perhaps things will be better when you stop again. Sadly, for Lemony it was merely an ill-fated attempt to keep himself from dwelling too much upon everything that was happening, but as everyone who has been through something similar knows, some things are impossible to ignore. If there are few things more uncomfortable than hearing a compliment you don’t feel you deserve, then surely one of them has to be attempting not to cry in front of another person, even though it’s quite clear to both of you that that is exactly what is happening. Lemony, being no stranger to weeping, was relatively accomplished in disguising such things, but there comes certain occasions where what has happened is so painful, and what you are feeling is so overwhelming, that it is impossible to have any modicum of self-control, a phrase which here means _he cried quite obviously, and quite loudly, for quite some time_.

It’s odd, the amount of things a person can think about during a good session of weeping. For a while it seems as though nothing else in the world exists aside from the thing making you weep, and then after you have let out some of the pressure your thoughts begin to clear. You begin to think ahead, you become either more despondent or more centred. Lemony has always said to be that it is possible to feel much better after a good cry, even if nothing about your situation has changed, and I must admit that sometimes he is right. It seems the larger and more unbearable the situation, the more it helps to simply cry it out; the more it seems as though there has been some kind of relief from the crushing weight that descends during such a situation, and that when the tears finally stop you might feel shaky and weak and a little exhausted but you also feel new again. 

When Lemony finally managed to stop crying he didn’t feel as though he had recovered from the blow but he knew what he must do now. It was a sudden thought, as such thoughts often are, the kind that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t ease the ache but does steady the tears. It becomes imperative to think; thoughts clear, breaths steady. To the outside observer it might look like a promising thing, as though the person is calming down, recovering, coming to their senses, emerging from the totally normal reaction to such horror and finally beginning to process it. Not many people would consider it to be a bad thing, but sometimes it is precisely that.

“You’re thinking,” Olivia said quietly, and Lemony was infinitely glad that she didn’t acknowledge the crying. 

“I am?”

“Jacques had the same expression when he was thinking.”

Lemony remembered the expression well: eyebrows furrowed, small frown, expression always slightly worried. It was true – he could feel the same expression on his face now, and he wondered just how many other times the look had been observed on his face, or how many times he had worn it without anyone noticing, a small and unknown tribute to his brother. If he had had any tears left in him, he might have cried again.

“There’s a lot to think about,” he said eventually. He sat up straighter and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. His face felt too warm and his eyes suddenly too dry. 

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m looking for some people. I’ll continue with that.”

“You should come with me.”

“Where are you going?” It occurred to Lemony that he didn’t yet know.

“There,” Olivia said, nodding to the side. “In the front seat.”

Lemony leaned over. Folded in the front seat was a large poster for a carnival, all bright, garish colours and promises of attractions, the largest of which seemed to be one Madame Lulu. Lemony gave a thin smile and replaced the poster.

“I can’t go there.”

“Why not?” Olivia glanced at him in the mirror again, looking confused. “You must. Where else will you go? You can’t just wander the Hinterlands. I heard from Jacques that there are starving lions out here somewhere.”

“There are, but not for many miles yet. Besides, they can’t run very fast.”

She was unsure. “How will you get around?”

“The same way I always have.” He didn’t say what that was. “I can’t go. I have urgent business elsewhere.”

“Surely you would be better off looking from there?”

“No,” Lemony said quietly, no longer looking at her. He was now looking out of the front of the car, where the road stretched seemingly endlessly ahead of them, and the car just visible there. “I think I might have already found it, actually.”

Olivia stared for a moment and then glanced at him again, looking worried. “They’re heading for the hospital.”

“Unsurprising. That’s the only other place out here, unless they’re planning a trip to the carnival as well.”

“Is that likely?”

“I don’t think so. I get the feeling they’re after something else.”

“At least that means they’ll be out of our way for a while.”

“Our of yours, perhaps.” He sat back again. “I need you to drop me off at the hospital.”

“Why?” Quite suddenly she sounded suspicious again. “Why would you want to be left there, knowing who’s wandering around?”

“I told you. I’m looking for something.”

“They don’t happen to be looking for the same thing, do they?”

Lemony caught the undertones but was positively convinced that no, they weren’t looking for the same thing at all. “I doubt it.”

“Surely it would be better for you to stick with me for now. You can’t expect anything good to come out of being there on your own, especially not after what he did to Jacques.”

“I doubt he’ll be expecting me,” Lemony replied. “I’ve been dead a lot longer than him.”

“I’m starting to think it’s normal for people to reappear from death,” Olivia sighed. “If only it were that simple.”

“You can drop me off or I’ll just jump out,” Lemony said casually. “I’ve done it many times before. I know how to roll.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If you really feel you must go there I’ll bring you, but I don’t see what you could possibly want there, or how you think you’ll travel around.”

“When you found me I had no vehicle,” Lemony pointed out.

“I suppose that’s true.”

“I know what I’m doing. This is very important to me.”

She nodded, sighed, glanced at him, lost her nerve. This time the strained silence lasted only a minute before she spoke up again, hesitantly, cautiously.

“You seem angry,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I know we barely know one another, but I’m worried about you. I don’t feel right just leaving you in the middle of nowhere, after what’s happened, with people who I know wish to hurt your family. And… perhaps I’m speaking out of line, but I would rather take that risk than stay quiet.” Her voice strengthened slightly, and she seemed to gain some confidence as she committed to it. It was a quality that Lemony had seen Jacques encourage in all his recruits. “I’m worried that if you’re angry, you might do something you haven’t thought through.”

Lemony remained indifferent. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Olivia said, sighing. “I don’t think you know what you mean, either.”

“I would love to tell you everything,” Lemony said, and for a moment he almost believed it – it would be nice to offload everything, to not feel so utterly alone out there. Of course, he knew better. “But it isn’t practical. I have my reasons. This is incredibly important. Of course I’m angry. I’m sure you are as well.”

She considered that for a moment. “I suppose I am.” 

“But you’re not doing anything you’re going to regret.”

“No. I promised Jacques I would… well, I promised him I would help. I promised him I would save the children.”

“So that's what you have to do.”

“It would be easier if there were two of us.”

Lemony gave a small smile. “I am not what you would call an asset.”

“You’re Jacques’ brother. He said he was working on something with his siblings, once upon a time. That you were all on the trail of something, until—”

“Things are different now,” Lemony said firmly. “We all have things we need to do.”

Making a large decision on an impulse is often a terrifying time full of doubts, but generally in such a situation it is clear to the person what they want. A decision made suddenly is often said to be an impulsive one, but it is often our impulses that dictate what we actually want. That impulse can often be seen as a gut instinct – that little flash of opinion or idea or feeling that occurs before we have even finished processing the situation, and it’s often said that we should trust our gut. Why this is alright to do when deciding if we like somebody or not, but unacceptable when making decisions that affect our own lives, is unknown to me.

Of course, it has to be said that there is a difference between the decision to, say, attend a university in a completely different country because you see the brochure and decide it would be a convenient way to avoid your pursuers, and the decision to, for example, impulsively embark on a journey of revenge against somebody who has done something unspeakable to somebody you care about. Even so, despite their differences the decision can be made just as quickly, just as determinedly, and both can hold the knowledge that if you don’t at least try, you will regret it for the rest of your life. 

“We were supposed to be doing this together,” Olivia said quietly, as the hospital grew closer and closer. It was a representation, really, a symbol – Olivia and Jacques would have never needed to go to the hospital, so their doing anything together there was unlikely. But the hospital itself did represent everything they had been fighting for, and it did bring home the danger now constantly looming over them, and it did bring home the fact that Olivia was not supposed to be going off alone to finish the job, and certainly that Lemony should not be embarking on a journey wholly unpredictable, alone on a dusty road with the vast expanse of nothingness stretched out around him and the sickeningly emphasised realisation that even these small islands of civilisation do not mean safety. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Olivia asked, knowing the answer, when she brought the taxi to a stop a short walk away from the hospital. “You could still come with me. You could help us. He would have liked that. I’m sure he would have liked that more than you being out here alone, with those people around.”

“My brother would have liked a lot for me, I’m sure,” Lemony said, and the lump in his throat was back, combined with something that felt unpleasantly like guilt. “But some things remain necessary despite someone’s wishes. Thank you for your help, Olivia. I doubt we’ll see one another again.”

It was an odd moment, both of them briefly staring at one another with the sudden and unpleasant realisation that they were now saying goodbye to their only other link to Jacques, and that upon their parting they would each be dealing with what had happened alone, away from anybody else who had known him. For Lemony it was a strange moment of what could have beens – of course he found out later that Jacques and Olivia loved one another, and that had things been different Olivia would have probably become part of their family. For Olivia it was the heartbreaking moment where she realised that she had been seeing memories of how Jacques had been in the strangest places: in similar facial features, in similar body language, in expressions and inclinations of the head and raisings of the eyebrow. Sometimes when you have to say goodbye to somebody, in whatever way, it can be a comfort to be around somebody who shares genetics with them, just for those comforting reminders that seem so inherently programmed into a person, as though they can never truly be gone while their fingerprints are still alive in someone else’s genetic makeup. I know that in the toughest months after our parents’ deaths my sisters and I clung to the moments where we saw our mother or father in one another: Vasiliy and Fionnuala share our mother’s red hair, whereas my hair is precisely our father’s dark shade and thickness. My sisters both wrinkle their noses slightly when annoyed or confused, just like Mother, and I have her habit of tapping my pen against my top teeth when I’m thinking. We have our father’s ears and Vasiliy hums under her breath when occupied with a task just like he did; we all share his sense of humour and the way we half-raise an eyebrow when amused. All of these things add up to a great comfort, especially when a bereavement is new – it is understandable why Olivia was reluctant to part with somebody who was a living, breathing reminder of Jacques. 

“I suppose we won’t,” she eventually said, and gave a smile that was suddenly teary. “I wish you luck. Whatever it is, I hope it brings you whatever you need.”

“And I you.” He opened the door. “I know he would have taught you well. I’ve seen volunteers like you before.”

“Only good things, I hope,” Olivia laughed, recovering herself somewhat.

“Like my brother. Noble. Staying true, until the very end.”

Perhaps some part of him already worried about what this decision would mean for him, for his principles, for the things he held close. This is of course only speculation on my part, but knowing him as well as I do I can’t believe it didn’t cross his mind at least once. His sudden desperate hope that Olivia, at least, would stay true does speak to me of somebody hoping that perhaps, in some universal balance, Olivia’s success would cancel out whatever it was he was planning to do – if he knew it yet. That it would be Olivia, perhaps, who carried on his brother’s legacy, and saved him from the burden of failure. 

“I’ll try,” she said, sincere, determined, the kind that Lemony recognised from somewhere distant in his own past. He had been like that once, he remembered, and spontaneously he remembered something else, something he had heard so often in those days.

“In a world too often governed by corruption and arrogance,” he said slowly, as though reading the words for the first time again, “it can often be difficult…” 

They finished the words together.

“…to stay true to one’s philosophical and literary principles.”

He climbed out. The air was still cooler than the taxi, a breeze creating an odd chill compared to the warmth in the car. 

“Lemony.”

He didn’t normally look back, but this time he did. She was looking at him from the window, that same look in her eye as she had had when he had first seen her.

“This story isn’t over yet,” she said, and as the taxi pulled away in a cloud of dust Lemony remembered that his brother had never said goodbye, because he had never wanted to tempt fate. Instead, he had always reminded him that the story wasn’t over. 

Lemony took a deep breath of the fresh air, but it did nothing to loosen the tightness in his chest.


	5. Chapter 5

I believe in the idea that sometimes things happen because it’s the right time for them. A lot of people call this coincidence – perhaps you’re thinking of a person and then later that day you see them, or perhaps you’re going through something stressful and you discover a book fallen open at a reassuring passage. I don’t think those are coincidences so much as signs, though from who I don’t know. All I know is that sometimes encouragement and comfort can come from unexpected and highly specific places, and sometimes I can’t think of how they can possibly know to manoeuvre themselves into my line of sight at just the right moment. 

I cannot hope to explain everything I feel regarding this phenomena, so I will let the following letter speak for itself. During the time where all of the previously described events were occurring, and when (unbeknownst to me) worse was yet to come, I spent a very stressful period of time worrying about all manner of things: where Lemony was, why he had fallen silent, why I was receiving his last correspondence from a stranger and then hearing nothing more, and how he was taking the now confirmed news about his brother. Communication with Lemony often and abruptly breaks off, but something about this was different: the strangeness of it and the emotional weight behind it both conspired to create an incredible sense of dread. I was also preoccupied with the holes I had quickly found in Lemony’s account of things and was debating with myself whether or not to embark upon the research that would lead to the document you are now reading. In one of these strange coincidences, or signs, or whatever you might call them, I rediscovered an old letter sent to me many years ago, when I was stuck in a highly unpleasant situation involving a prolonged period of stranding in a very cold and damp cave, along with a warrant calling for my execution and, worst of all, terrible allergies. I was working diligently to clear the name I was currently using but it was going to inevitably require some rather underhanded tactics; I was much younger then and without guidance I was having quite the moral dilemma. The letter in question arrived during that time and I have kept it ever since, and frequently reread it in times such as these – though, I am ashamed to say, over the years my moral dilemmas have grown rarer and rarer, as they so often do for those who do what we do. 

The letter, of course, is from Lemony, and is recreated here in its entirety. 

 

_Despard—_

_I hope this letter finds you quickly. Getting letters to people hiding in damp places is always risky business, thanks to mould and paper’s annoying habit of disintegrating upon contact with water. I did consider writing this letter on some kind of laminate, but transporting it would be far too noisy. Working on the assumption that this letter has found you and you are reading it, which I’m sure you are, because despite my complaints I do have faith in the subterranean postal system, I will attempt to answer some of your questions._

_To address the main question you put forth in your letter – which is to say, the question that you did not ask because it was too frightening, but that was clear throughout the entire letter if one cared to read between the lines – yes, sometimes we have to do things that are usually seen as bad in order to do good. This is a complicated lesson that many of us spend our lives learning. It seems like a paradox, and perhaps it is. The idea of doing something dishonest, or sneaky, or harmful, or murderous, all for some idea of the greater good? It seems preposterous, and yet here we are. It is a lesson we learn for the first time and expect that to be the most difficult time, but unfortunately that is not the case. It will be difficult every time you learn it, and re-learn it, and try to forget it, and try to deny it, and dress it up in half-truths, and whatever else you may find yourself doing in order to get through it. It is a truth that will be there no matter how much you rewrite your own history, or your accomplice’s history, or (if you are important and villainous enough) world history. I would, if I were overly cynical or a terrible person who enjoys denying hope to children, tell you to get used to it, but here is the thing: you must never get used to it. Only when you face such things with no dilemma should you worry about your morals._

_Now that I have addressed the main question that was being asked, I can now turn my attention to the specific one. This was, of course, if it is really alright for you to go snooping in places that you shouldn’t be while committing identity theft, if it means that you can clear your name. What is too much to do for the truth? It is a good question, and I hope you don’t mind my answering with an anecdote – a word meaning personal story which relates to the matter at hand. Usually I would try to summarise succinctly, but as I imagine you are quite bored and running low on reading material, I’m sure you won’t mind my lengthier reminiscing._

_When I was not that much younger than you are now, I experienced the same kind of moral dilemma. I wouldn’t say I was a new volunteer but I was a young one, and as I’m sure you know all too well, your early days as a volunteer are often spent on perplexing and pointless errands which are nearly always confusing and likely end in some form of chaos or exile. The difference between my situation and yours was that I had less time to think, which I believe was a blessing. There are few things worse during a chaotic situation than to have too long to think. A small amount of time can be a blessing, because it enables you to gather your thoughts and formulate a plan, but too long and you find yourself dwelling on your situation and asking questions that would be better asked once the deed was done and you were safe. This is not to say that the latter is any easier, but the point I am trying to make is that you are having this dilemma alone in a mossy cave, and I had it in the company of my elder brother, which is undeniably a better place to have a crisis._

_My brother Jacques has an extraordinary talent of being able to make anything sound sincere, no matter how cliché it might sound coming from somebody else. This is because he has the rare ability known as always being sincere, which in somebody who had done what we do for so long is a rare quality. I knew that no matter what I confided in him he would have something to say which would make me feel better, and while I was absolutely correct on that assumption I would like to instead focus on a part of the conversation that I was not prepared for, and that has stuck with me ever since._

_It was a strange setting for such an emotionally heavy conversation. We were baking cookies, using an old family recipe passed down from our great-grandmother, who was rumoured to have got it from her great-grandmother, who I presume in turn got it from her great-grandmother. This is of course impossible to truly verify, but I can confirm our great-grandmother did make them. I never met her but my siblings did, and apparently she was a remarkable woman with the sole disadvantage of being absolutely incapable of baking any less than nine dozen cookies at a time. As we had followed her recipe to the letter, Jacques and I found ourselves with a lot of cookies to frost, and a lot of time to talk._

_We discussed a lot of things that evening, many of which were dark and unpleasant things that usually we keep at the back of our minds. Jacques has never been one to shy away from such topics, and I think the thought of letting me find myself in such a situation with no preparation horrified him. We talked about doing what was necessary, we talked about keeping things in perspective, we talked about how some things are never necessary, even when they are, and that doing such things will fundamentally change the way you perceive yourself and rightfully so. I could recite the entire conversation from memory, so ingrained into me the words are, but right now I will keep it relevant._

_When my brother had been younger he had gone through a stage where he had been obsessed with various parts of history, and one of these time periods was the American Revolution. Even now, Jacques can rattle off facts about this time period – and many others – at a very impressive rate. He told me that night that his hero had been a man named Nathan Hale, a spy for the continental army who was captured and executed by the British while on an intelligence-gathering mission. Jacques told me that it wasn’t so much the story that gripped him, but rather what Hale said before he was executed: “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.” This quote so purely summarises my brother that I find myself smiling as I write it – as Jacques told me that night, it wasn’t the patriotism that drew him in but rather the idea of supporting something, or believing in something, so truly and completely that you would die for it, and not only that but you would do it over and over again if you had the chance._

_Filled with sudden curiosity, I asked him, “If you had to give your life for one thing, one ideal, what would it be?”_

_He thought for a moment before he answered me. “Justice.”_

_For anyone who knows my brother, this is not surprising at all. Still, sitting on the floor of his kitchen, icing cookie after cookie, the scene completely set by the soft playing of Toxic by Britney Spears on the radio, it seemed ridiculously, overwhelmingly real._

_“What about you?” Jacques asked me, and I realised I hadn’t expected the question at all. To my surprise, I answered immediately._

_“Truth.”_

_This is something I have thought about frequently since. I have thought about it when I have been unable to sleep at night, and I have thought about it in dreams when I have managed to sleep. I have thought about it each and every time I have found myself in danger because of the truth, or rather because of my pursuit of it; I have thought about it while under arrest, while in a jail cell, while being chased by an angry mob, while being bundled into a trunk and driven through the dead of night, while feeling despondent and hopeless and afraid. I have thought about it over and over again and my answer has remained the same. Truth. Justice. What grand ideas to claim you would die for! But time and time again, I know my brother and I have had to face that declaration and think, again, would I die for this? Or perhaps, could I die for this? The answer has always been yes._

_I know you must feel despondent now, and hopeless, and most definitely afraid. I understand that the events I have described to you, the things I have faced in my past, are right now your present – you are alone and facing incredible odds. You are worried because you are not sure how much is too much, but what is your other choice? It is one thing to allow the corruption of the truth to harm others, but in protecting them you must not forget to protect yourself. We do noble work and we need people to continue it. To sacrifice yourself so you do not break the law does nothing for the long-term good. This is the constant analysis we live with._

_You could live in that cave for as long as you wanted. I have full faith that you are clever enough to create a nice life for yourself there, and indeed I have spent my share of time living in odd places. I did once stay in a cave for several months, and actually had a fully functioning central heating system by the end of it. It’s possible, and it can even be quite pleasant. But I don’t think that is what you want. I know this, because you asked the questions you did. Those are the questions of someone who knows what is necessary._

_I was able to work out all of these complicated questions in a quiet place in the company of my brother. I am sorry that you have not been allowed the same safety, but should this letter help you to make up your mind, I do hope your decision brings you to a place where we can discuss this in person. The only thing holding you back, I am sure, is fear, and you’ll be pleased to know that our organisation has a handy quote for that, too._

_Do the scary thing first, and get scared later._

_– L_


	6. Chapter 6

Heimlich Hospital was a deeply unpleasant place, as hospitals are. Even when a hospital is located in a well-populated area and is well-maintained, there is something inherently depressing about them. When I was younger I used to complain that I didn’t like hospitals because of all the death there, and my sisters would try to reassure me by telling me to remember about all the happy occasions there, too, such as babies being born, people being cured of their diseases, and dastardly villains hopefully getting their comeuppance. To my credit I did try, but somehow in my mind the good in these places never outweighed the bad. You never jump for joy when you hear that somebody has gone to the hospital. 

Standing a short distance away, having approached from the unbuilt side of the hospital so as to not draw attention, Lemony was again reminded just how depressing such buildings are. Heimlich Hospital had the unfortunate feature of only being half-completed, so rather than two identical towers standing side by side there was instead one completed tower and one skeleton of a tower, all decaying scaffolding and wind whistling through the empty shell of the upper levels. It was a depressing sight and not to mention an eerie one, made all the worse by the knowledge of just who was inside the hospital right at that very moment.

Lemony had two choices. He could attempt to get in via the incomplete side, scaling the scaffolding and hoping to find an open link via a doorway (several doors of the hospital opened outwards into sheer nothingness, as several new employees found out every few months, with often tragic consequences) or he could try and talk his way in. Lemony wasn’t opposed to either, considering he had done similar and more dangerous things before, but with the wind picking up and the windows facing the scaffolding still open, it was likely unwise to simply start climbing. Really he knew he needed a way to scout the place out and perhaps formulate a plan, because while he had made that all important decision in the taxi with Olivia he hadn’t actually thought about how he was going to implement it yet. When one has a goal, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, it is wise to have a plan, and certainly Lemony’s goal was by no means small or insignificant. In fact it was very significant, extremely significant, because it was not something he had ever done before – or ever really seriously considered doing – despite the fact that he had had plenty of reason to think about it before. This was not the first time that somebody he loved had been hurt or worse; it wasn’t the first time that he had felt so angry, or so helpless, or so frustrated at the unfairness of the world. Perhaps this was one time too many, perhaps it had finally broken whatever mental barriers are put in place to stop us from thinking this way and having the world descend into chaos – I don’t know. All I know what that as Lemony stood outside the hospital and watched it for anything that would give him an idea as to how to get in as undetected as possible, he had not wavered from the decision he had made, and the weight of what it meant had not quite hit him. 

I think he knew, deep down, the reality of what he was doing. I don’t think for a moment that he was without the foresight to see where the chain of events would lead, because he is not that kind of man. I think it was subconscious, that he didn’t let himself acknowledge it until it was too late, but it was certainly there. It was there in the way he spent longer than usual considering what to do, and it was there in the way that he went about his plan in a very methodical way, paying far too much attention to the small details so that the larger ones wouldn’t have a chance to hit him before he was ready for them. Lemony has always been good at thinking on his feet, so he entered the hospital with no other plan than to pretend that he was injured – hardly difficult, considering the state of him.

“What did you say happened to you, again?” Babs, the bespectacled woman currently sitting behind a pile of paperwork at the reception desk, asked with only mildly concealed alarm. 

“My arm was bitten,” Lemony repeated, slower this time, maintaining eye contact, “by a starving lion.”

Babs’ eyes travelled to first one arm, and then the other.

“They seem awfully intact,” she said hesitantly, beginning to gather the admission paperwork from various drawers without having to look. “I would have expected… more missing, from a lion bite.”

“Oh, it looks better than it is,” Lemony replied. “I’m very good at tourniquets.”

“I suppose you must be.”

“The lion was starving, I should emphasise,” he continued, as her suspicious gaze continued to linger. “I’m surprised it wasn’t already dead. It was just a bag of bones. Still has an impressive bite, of course, but not very strong otherwise. It took a little struggle but throwing it off was easy compared to a healthy lion, and he could hardly run after me, could he?”

She seemed a little more convinced, though not entirely. “I didn’t know we had lions around here.”

“They escaped from a carnival.”

“I thought that was a rumour.”

“It isn’t.”

Paperwork is not usually an advantage, especially when there is a lot of it. At best it is a necessary annoyance in order to move things along, and at worst it is a hindrance and an inconvenience, busywork for people who simply want to look productive but do not want to actually do anything. The amount of paperwork that had to be done on a daily basis at Heimlich Hospital was nothing short of ridiculous, but it was something that could not be circumvented, a word which here means _avoided, so that more important things can be done such as saving lives and tending to the sick and injured_. Every person who came into the waiting room at Heimlich Hospital had to fill out the tedious entry forms, which asked them everything from their name and home address to their favourite colour and their opinion on paperwork (those who responded with high praise of paperwork were, it was often noted by regulars, seen more swiftly by the doctors). It would be frustrating to fill out even for somebody who was being honest in the forms, but to have to think of false answers for the seemingly endless array of questions would have likely been impossible had Lemony not had a vast stock of them to draw from, along with his great depth of creativity. Even so, it was made all the more difficult by the rest of his cover story – filling out several long forms, amounting to hundreds of pages, was not easy when using only one arm. 

Even so, this was one of the rare occasions when paperwork was in fact an advantage. The advantage was that it took a very long time, and that allowed Lemony to sit there for a long period without being questioned, discretely looking around the room and waiting for an opportunity to slip out of view. From there he would simply have to disguise himself as somebody who belonged in the hospital, and so long as he was careful he would have time to look around and try to add some more to the plan he knew he was formulating but was still not fully acknowledging yet. It seems an odd position to be in, to actively be making plans for something you won’t even allow yourself to accept as fact, but people do very strange things when they’re upset and Lemony was very upset indeed.

He seized his opportunity when Babs was turned away from the waiting room and wholly engrossed in filing some paperwork. She set herself to this task with the upmost dignity, lifting each folder from its place on the desk, studying the label on the front, and then rather ceremonially rolling her chair to a filing cabinet or pigeon hole and, after double-checking the label and occasionally glancing at the first page tucked into the folder, sliding the papers into their place. She did this individually for each one, not even considering the sacrilege of doing several at once; judging from the sheer size of the papers on the desk, Lemony accurately guessed he would have several hours before her attention was recaptured by the waiting room. Short of anybody coming in, she was very much occupied, and looking at the deserted and dusty landscape outside the waiting room, Lemony didn’t think there would be many other visitors that day.

He stood up slowly and smoothly, walking noiselessly across the waiting room and crouching down to slip the half-finished papers into the wastepaper basket beside the reception desk. Lemony was no big fan of paperwork, especially when it was as pointless as these forms were, but even with this opinion it still seemed like a grave sin to be throwing out forms in the bureaucratic shrine that was Heimlich Hospital. With a wince, he straightened up again, stepping to the side and quickly hurrying down the hallway and out of sight. 

Heimlich Hospital looked more abandoned than in use, with rust on everything metal (including, Lemony once observed with a shudder, the surgical scalpels) and mould peeling the ceiling plaster from the ceiling. The walls were grimy, the floor was sticky, the entire place was undeniably dirty and yet smelled, inexplicably, of disinfectant. Lemony wandered through the hallways without encountering another soul, partially due to the remote location and therefore emptiness of the hospital, and partially due to the fact that the only other people roaming the halls right now – the Volunteers Fighting Disease – were heard far before they were seen. A series of detours and ducking down side corridors and Lemony avoided them easily; as he walked he kept a mental picture of the hospital’s layout, which is useful to do at the best of times but exceptionally useful when, unknown to you, the building you are in will burn to the ground in less than twenty-four hours. 

There are few disguises that one can adopt when in a hospital. If a patient would be inconvenient – which it certainly would be, Lemony had decided, upon looking in at some of the patients and finding them not doing all that much aside from laying in bed looking more miserable than the average hospital patient – then that really left one with the options of doctor or nurse. Neither of those things were something that Lemony wanted to attempt to pass himself off as, because not only did he figure it would be easier to spot an imposter masquerading as a doctor or a nurse as a hospital would surely keep track of such things, but more frighteningly, it might be expected of him that he actually make the rounds, and while Lemony knew a lot about a wide variety of topics he did not know the first thing about being a doctor. The last thing he wanted was to end up wanted for negligent homicide again, so he devised an idea that would make him wholly invisible to everyone else – janitorial staff. 

Considering it appeared that cleaning consisted of “spraying disinfectant on everything until it smelled repulsive”, Lemony was more than qualified for the job. He wasn’t exactly dressed as a janitor and it appeared there were no janitorial uniforms – most likely because nobody was actually employed to clean – but there was a cap, a mop, and a bucket, and that was all he really needed. Filling the bucket with a foul-smelling mixture of a little water and too much disinfectant, Lemony wheeled the rickety bucket out into the hall and, whistling, began to make his rounds. 

Just like paperwork, the treatment of the average member of janitorial staff is often not an advantage, nor is it anything good at all, really. The people who keep our public buildings clean are often treated like second-rate citizens, the fact that they deal with dirt and waste as part of their jobs somehow being translated as them being dirty and a waste too, and that perhaps if they had done this or done that or put more effort in here or done more there, they wouldn’t be degrading themselves to such a low job as cleaning up after other, more important people. Any person with an ounce of sense knows that this is of course not in the slightest bit true, and that if all the janitorial staff in the world just threw down their mops and quit we would soon be begging for them to return. People don’t consider this when they’re being rude, because people like to feel better than others for some reason, and they prioritise this over thinking critically for a moment and trying to imagine a world where no one cleaned up after them – because you can be sure that the type of person who looks down on janitors is definitely the kind of person who wouldn’t know how to clean up after themselves even if they had been given a step-by-step guide. 

But for Lemony, wandering inconspicuously down the halls and splashing disinfectant everywhere, it was a blessing. The rare people that passed him in the hallways did so without bothering him; indeed, they always looks determinedly away from him, because Lemony would deliberately turn towards them as though he might want to make conversation and predictably, every time he did so, the person would look in the complete opposite direction and hurry away as quickly as they could. He was hiding in plain sight, able to take a decent look at the building, and while he wasn’t sure what he was looking for yet he was positive that having no idea of the state or layout of the place would do more harm than good. He was completely correct in this assumption, because he wanderings eventually took him to a place where he knew he could pass some time – not to mention aid himself in his research. 

The Library of Records was, like many places in the hospital including the gift shop and the operating theatre, closed due to budget cuts, but just as he arrived somebody was leaving, and Lemony had the perfect cover story.

“Not locking up yet, I hope?” he called jovially, in the tone of someone who has not spoken to another human being in several days and wishes desperately for even a snippet of conversation that isn’t you missed a spot.

Hal, the kindly and efficient man in charge of the Library until it first vandalised and then set alight, was almost blind and took a long time fumbling with his keys. He paused in this endeavour to turn in Lemony’s direction and squint, trying to get him into focus.

“Well, I don’t recognise that voice,” he said thoughtfully. “Are you another volunteer?”

“Oh no. I’m not very good at singing cheery songs. I’m the janitor.”

“The janitor? Hmm.” He hummed thoughtfully. “I didn’t think they were going to replace the old guy. Not after the budget cuts. You know, the place has really gone to the dogs since he left. He was a hard worker, I know you probably can’t believe this but this place never looked so run-down while he was here. Now, I can’t see too well but I can smell the mould, I don’t have to see it! I do miss him a lot. He worked hard. It was a shame about the incident.”

Against his better judgement, Lemony asked. “The incident?”

“Oh yes. It was leprosy that got him.”

“Well, I… I suppose he would come into contact with such things in his role.”

“Oh, no, not leprosy. _Leprosy_. It’s a strange thing… a girl on the Ward for People With Nasty Rashes, for some reason her parents called her Leprosy! Well, I can see why. She wasn’t very pleasant. She stabbed the old janitor and he died instantly. Anyway, what did you say your name was?”

“I—oh, um, that’s… tragic,” Lemony said, stunned. “My name, I—didn’t actually give one. Many people don’t ask. It’s…” Understandably, his mind had gone blank. “Jan… itor.” He winced.

“Your name is Janitor?” Hal asked incredulously.

“Jan Tor,” Lemony corrected quickly. “It’s very ironic, but my middle name begins with an E. How strange that I ended up in this career.”

“What is your middle name? Don’t tell me it’s a cleaning product.”

“Of course not. My parents couldn’t think of any cleaning products beginning with E. It’s… Ellington.” He winced again. “I’d prefer if it wasn’t brought up. You can imagine I would get teased.”

“Well, yes, I imagine so.”

“You’re shockingly nice about it.”

“I don’t believe in ridiculing people for things they can’t control,” Hal said, smiling, “or ridiculing people at all, actually, Mr Tor.”

“Please,” Lemony said, “call me Jan.”

“What can I do for you, Jan?”

“I’m guessing the Library hasn’t been cleaned since the last guy left? I could do it for you now.”

“It could use a clean,” Hal agreed, “but I have to lock it up now – it’s closed. I couldn’t possibly leave the keys with somebody else.”

“You could lock me in,” Lemony replied. He had been locked in worse places before and had strong faith in his ability to escape most locked rooms if the need arose. “And unlock it in say… an hour?”

“I really shouldn’t,” Hal said slowly, “but…”

Lemony kept a trustworthy amount of eye contact, even though it was difficult to tell if Hal could see him from that distance.

“…you seem trustworthy enough,” Hal eventually replied. “Only one hour, though. And you have to work with the lights off.”

“I have good vision in the dark,” Lemony replied, and Hal laughed.

“Well, that makes one of us!”

A few moments later and Lemony found himself in the safest place he could hope to be – a large, locked room, with absolutely nobody suspecting he might be in there even if they were looking for him, which he had reason to believe they were not. There had been no concerns raised about a patient mauled by a lion who had gone missing; if Babs had noticed something other than her paperwork by now she hadn’t raised the alarm (Lemony suspected that there was lots of paperwork involved with losing a patient), and even if she had noticed there was nothing to hint that said patient was now dressed as a janitor and was roaming the halls. He would be safe for now, though of course he knew better to relax. Olaf was still undeniably in the building somewhere, but Lemony got the feeling that if he was going to find him, it would be better to wait for Olaf to come to him. Lemony had the feeling that sooner or later he would see Olaf – or at least one of his troupe – hanging around the Library; what better way to keep an eye on it than to befriend Hal?

No longer whistling, not wishing to draw any attention to the room, Lemony slowly wheeled the bucket to the other side of the room and then, after listening for any other sounds and finding nothing, he discarded his cap, pulled a small, thin sliver of metal out of his pocket, and began roaming the filing cabinets in search of anything that might be of interest. He only had an hour, but he had discovered more in less time, and under much more strenuous circumstances than these. 

Waiting was never the preferred option when such risks were being taken, and certainly when such a terrible man was involved, but strangely Lemony felt no pressure to act. He knew Olaf well enough by now to know that sometimes, patience was all it took. Chasing after him was never a good thing – especially not when suddenly and unpleasantly finding that you were alone and right where he had lead you. With an unpleasant chill, Lemony thought that his brother must have realised that far too late.


	7. Chapter 7

L—

Still no word from you. More than slightly concerned. Enclosing the reason as to why.

—D

_The Daily Punctilio_  
**SUSPICIOUS PERSON ACTING SUSPICIOUSLY**

The murder of mediocre actor Count Olaf has been shrouded in yet more mystery today. As curiosity swells in the small village where the murder occurred, rumours have circulated that there may have been a fourth accomplice assisting the Baudelaire murderers in their crimes. 

“Everyone has been saying it,” said one resident who did not wish to be named, but gave her address as the house opposite the gas station and one over to the left. “It’s undeniable. So many people saw another person hanging around that night, and you can just tell that he was up to no good. Plus he stole the body! Why would you steal a body if you didn’t have something to hide? I don’t know if I should be saying this, considering they’re all still out there, but the truth has to come out. I am very nervous, though, and would like to point out that I’m home alone between the hours of 6 and 8pm, so don’t knock for me then. I won’t risk answering the door.”

This story has been supported by many other witnesses, several of whom reported a strange figure in the area on the night of the murder. Still more witnesses have reported seeing a man in a blood-covered suit taking the body from the coroner’s wagon and vanishing with it shortly thereafter. The coroner was originally supposed to remove the body that day, but was delayed.

“I should have left when I had the chance,” he said when asked. “But I just couldn’t get out of town then, you know? There was a lot going on, and then they caught them murderers and I decided to stay and see what was going on. Then I was going to go but they was gonna burn 'em at the stake, and I had to stay for that, didn’t I?”

It is believed that the suspicious figure may have made his escape when the town was distracted by attempting to burn alive three children (then five, then three again), and by the time the villagers returned he had made clean his escape.

“If you see him, make sure you kill him!” yelled Detective Dupin from a fleeing car. “Just kill him! Can never be too careful!”

The case remains under investigation.


	8. Chapter 8

When Lemony heard a key turning in the lock, he was caught completely unaware. He looked around himself in search of a clock but could find none, or at least none that he could see, which was no good. He was fairly certain that it had not been an hour.

Quietly, he replaced the files open on his lap, closed the drawer, and stood up, stepping backwards until he was sure there were enough filing cabinets between him and the sliver of light he could now see at the door. It had opened, and three figures – one significantly smaller than the other two – had stepped into the room, closing the door behind them and becoming lost in the darkness.

As I mentioned at the very beginning of this account, there were times where the lives of Lemony and the Baudelaire orphans came very close. There were occasions where Lemony arrived in a location only days after they left, or days before they arrived. There were moments where he was so close to them that he found some of their meagre belongings: a scrap of fabric, a few scribbled notes, a rock bitten wonderfully into the shape of a cat. He kept them all, of course, for the purposes of research, and indeed as I write this I am looking at that rock-cat, ever in awe at the dexterity of Sunny’s teeth. While this is not an unusual occurrence – being in close proximity to the Baudelaires, I mean, not the chewing of a rock into an anatomically accurate cat, which is very strange for anyone but especially a baby – there is a definite difference between _close_ meaning _in the same general area with only a short period of time separating the two of you_ , and _close_ meaning _only a few dozen feet away, crouched behind a filing cabinet and watching them step cautiously closer_. 

Lemony had never met the Baudelaire children. He had known their parents well and had never stopped loving their mother, but a complicates series of unfortunate events had resulted in Lemony’s disappearance, presumed death, arrest, execution, or some combination of them, all depending on who you ask. The overall theme was, of course, that Lemony was no longer around and everybody, his siblings included, believed that it would be a permanent thing. For that reason, Lemony had never met Beatrice’s children, though of course he was familiar with them. It is an odd occurrence to see somebody that you feel you know well, even though you know that you cannot know them; it is like knowing a celebrity or a dead relative you never got the chance to meet. You know the facts about them and you know their life story, and if you are dedicated enough you might even know the celebrity’s address and what they keep in their bedroom drawers, but you do not know them as a person. You do not know the nuances that make them _them_ , you do not know their daily habits or what it’s like to speak with them, one-on-one, to see how they are and how they act and all of the tiny little quirks that we cannot ever hope to learn from a distance. It is something that most of us are aware of – that a distant knowledge of somebody is a superficial one – but it doesn’t stop it from being highly unpleasant to remember, and this is something of what Lemony was experiencing as he hid in the shadows and watched Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire looking nervously around themselves. It was a very lonely realisation, and a very helpless one. Lemony did not know the children to that level but he had known their mother, and he knew, looking at their nervous expressions and the tiredness in their eyes, that this was the last thing that Beatrice would have ever wanted for her children. 

He was so caught up in the unfairness of it all that their conversation hit him with no warning whatsoever. 

“Hal said he had very specific instructions on where to put anything labelled _Snicket_.”

Lemony ducked back behind the filing cabinet and took a moment to catch his breath. It had been so wholly unexpected that hearing them say his surname so casually – and now, hearing them say his brother’s name – was like a bucket of icy cold water being thrown over him. Thankfully they communicated openly about where they were going to look, so Lemony was able to avoid the letters that they would be heading towards and double back around them, watching to see just what it was they were looking for. They appeared to be in a hurry, and Hal’s organisational system did seem to be lacking; Lemony had almost despaired with them when Sunny, the baby, spoke up.

“VFD!” she declared, and Lemony blinked. Since when had she started talking? 

Lemony followed them, a few rows over and walking soundlessly, over to the cabinets labelled S. By the time he had caught up they had found what they were looking for; he caught a glimpse of a small, round film before he had to hurry after them again, catching up with them over by the south wall where the projectors were set up, and also where a fire would soon be lit, but not for a few more hours yet. 

I know what was on that tape, because I have a copy myself. It was sent to Lemony in the care of myself from the same mysterious O who sent me the most recent of his manuscripts, who I now know to be Olivia. Usually when one knows what is contained upon a film or inside a book it makes it easier to summarise, and when one knows at least one of the viewers or readers well, it can be a solid basis to gain a decent idea of what they may have been thinking as they viewed or read whatever it was. This, however, is an exception.

I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for Lemony, hidden behind some filing cabinets in a room flickering with low light, hearing his brother’s voice again, suddenly and with no warning. I don’t know what he must have thought, peeking out from behind the cabinet and seeing him again, as he was, whole and healthy and undeniably himself. I cannot fathom the sense of loss and anger and grief he must have felt, standing quietly and unable to even weep for the man now lost to him, so close yet so impossibly, irreversibly far from him. If you have ever accidentally stumbled across something given to you by somebody now no longer in your life I am sure you can understand at least a little of what Lemony was feeling. I cannot hope to ever adequately explain, and I also cannot hope to ever adequately explain the strange combination of emotions that must have arisen from hearing Jacques say that there might be a survivor of the fire. 

I am quite sure that even Lemony, despite experiencing those emotions, could explain them in that moment, but at any rate he did not have to. This part is not my story to tell, and at any rate it would take far too long and I lack many of the resources available to Lemony when it comes to the Baudelaires, especially in this situation, as he was physically there. The general idea is that that particular moment heralded the arrival of Esmé Squalor, a glamourous but wholly unpleasant lady with no idea of what constituted appropriate hospital attire, and for several minutes afterwards the scene could only be described as chaotic. Lemony had no choice but to quickly flee to the furthest possible point and, with some difficulty and a sudden and unexpected appreciation for his school gym classes, where the climbing of a rope had seemed completely unnecessary for adult life, scale a filing cabinet well out of the way of Esmé’s destruction. It seemed precarious, to be up so high with nothing to hide behind, but Lemony had made many useful observations in his time in hiding and perhaps the truest of all was thus: when searching for suspicious activity, people rarely look up. 

There is a phrase for the stunned and impossibly silent moment after a bout of chaos: when the dust settles. It is a figurative phrase referring to the aftermath of a lot of action, born perhaps from the visual image of running feet or galloping horses kicking up dust which then settles upon the ground and allows you to see your feet again, now likely on a path pockmarked by other footprints of either human or horse. Sometimes of course this can be a literal figure of speech, such as if you were being chased down a dusty road by galloping horses and have managed to evade them, but more of the time it is not. For example, there is no dust in the Library of Records, but when the dust had settled in there regardless, Lemony found himself alone, perched on his cabinet and observing the destruction around him. The Library had been trashed, most of the cabinets knocked over, stray pieces of paper scattered across the floor. Klaus and Sunny had vanished in the fray and Violet – poor Violet – had found herself in the hands of Count Olaf, a fleeting glimpse of whom Lemony caught as the door swung closed. All in all, it was a lot to happen in only a couple of minutes. 

Sliding down the cabinet, Lemony realised two things. The first was that he had to get out of the room, because to be found here with it in this state was going to cause accusations to fly, and when accusations flew, they always seemed to stick to him. The second was that he had to ditch the janitor story, because as useful as it was the Library of Records had been destroyed and a janitor named Jan E. Tor was not an easy person to forget. He left the hat and strode quickly to the door and, glancing back as he slipped out into the hallway, felt a sudden pang of sympathy for poor Hal, who had seemed like such a nice man. 

The hallway outside was dark and deserted but there were noises echoing down the hall, which Lemony followed for lack of a better plan. He had been hoping for an opportunity to lay low and strike on his own terms, but as plans often do, that had fallen apart. It was a grim walk up that dirty hallway, because now that the dust had settled Lemony had realised something incredibly unpleasant. The strange emotions that he hadn’t managed to put words to in the Library had finally solidified, and he was left with the numb realisation of both what he had decided to do here and also what he was committed to doing. This was, as I’m sure most of you have worked out, revenge.

There has been a lot said about revenge. Some people view it as a necessity, and others see it as simply human nature. Some people believe in proportional retribution – a term meaning _dishing back to others precisely what they dished out to you, no more, no less_ – while others don’t care too much about proportion and believe that if you wrong somebody, you should take back whatever you’re given without complaint. Some people believe in forgiveness and wish for no revenge, others believe in karma and take comfort from knowing that the world will punish their wrong-doer in turn. Some people plan their revenge out for years, and others take it impulsively. Some people find closure from their revenge, whereas for others it leaves them feeling empty and hollow and as though they are just as bad as the person who wronged them in the first place. There is no end to the options and experiences and opinions, and even trying to summarise such a complicated subject with one single person as an example is impossible, but I shall do my best to recreate Lemony’s dilemma. 

He had not, up until that point, acknowledged that what he was doing was revenge. He had made the decision quickly, out of grief and anger and helplessness, and out of a sense that he had to do something to restore the balance of what had happened. Like many people, he had experienced something atrociously unfair, and a common reaction to such a thing is anger over what has happened, and fear that you let it happen. The idea of revenge is like a soothing balm for the hurt: if you make the person who did this hurt like you hurt, or like the person they wronged hurt, you can restore the balance, regain control, move on with your life. If you give back to them what they gave to you, _it is fair_.

Somehow Lemony had reached this conclusion subconsciously and had managed to avoid acknowledging what it really, truly meant until he was in very deep water, a term which here has nothing to do with actual water and instead has to do with the metaphorical water of being alone in a building full of your enemies. Despite the fact that he had no idea that he was truly committed to such a thing he had hoped, deep down, for something to come along that would talk him out of it. This is a common reaction when a person is unsure: I was taught, growing up, that if I was stuck between two choices and I did not know which one to pick, I should flip a coin, because the second before the coin landed I would know what I was hoping for. Matters of revenge are much more complicated and cannot – or perhaps, _should not_ – be settled with something as simple as a coin toss, but Lemony had been hoping all the same that something would come along and point him in the right direction. The unexpected appearance of his brother had been that sign, and Lemony had been hoping that seeing Jacques – good, noble Jacques who had always had faith in everybody, who believed in everyone’s inherent goodness, and who had paid so dearly for it – might have pushed him off the path he was taking. He had hoped that his brother’s image might remind him of his brother’s ideals, of the fact that revenge had never been something to cross Jacques’ mind, of the fact that Jacques would not want him in danger on his behalf, but that hadn’t happened. In fact, despite the guilt and the grief it brought him, seeing his brother had simply made Lemony angrier, and much more eager for revenge. Jacques had always been so good, so willing to give people another chance – and where had that left him? It was an awful thought but it is impossible to control such things when so angry, and when still reeling from such a terrible event. 

Anger can be useful at times, but left unchecked it can be dangerous. Unchecked anger can made us reckless, and violent, and disturb our order of thought, resulting in us rushing into things without adequate planning. It could be argued that Lemony was already halfway there, walking quickly up the halls of that hostile hospital with no idea of what he was doing or what he _would_ do, and had Count Olaf appeared out of a side hallway right at that moment I do not know what he would have done, as I’m sure he doesn’t, either. As it happened, he managed to avoid that particular consequence but failed to avoid another one, one that he did not realise had occurred until several moments later.

It is impossible to say which of Olaf’s henchpersons might have seen Lemony walking up the hallways. Many of them were out and about in the hallways for various reasons relating to various dastardly schemes, so it could have been any of them. Lemony was in a state of agitation and was perhaps therefore not as observant as he ordinarily was, but I have reason to believe the person that spotted him could not have been the Hook-Handed Man, the Bald Man, or the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender, because all of these people are quite tall and I am sure Lemony would have at least acknowledged a tall figure lurking down a side hall. This leads me to believe that it was one or both of the White-Faced Women, as despite being two of them they were both very small, and therefore easily missed behind a wheeled bed or handwashing station in a side hall. 

Lemony was, of course, in search of Count Olaf, preferably alone, but in times of great scheming he can not often be found that way. He did locate him, after several more minutes of walking and listening, but it was obviously in a very roundabout way. The person or persons who had spotted him, most likely the White-Faced Women, knew better his location and beat Lemony to it with enough of a head start to be updating Olaf on what they had seen as Lemony arrived. He had just been about to step into the hallway from the side one he was in when he heard voices disturbingly close to him; he quickly realised that they were in the room right next to the hall, meaning there was only a single wall between them. He froze and listened carefully, and, like many things eavesdropped, it was an unpleasant but necessary thing to hear. Sometimes we do not want to hear things because it brings us terrible news, but to not hear it would put us at a disadvantage, which puts us in a very awkward position. We don’t know whether to feel dread at the bad news, comfort from the fact that we are no longer at such a disadvantage, relief that we have been mistaken for somebody else and therefore have more of an advantage, or grief because the person we have been mistaken for is no longer around and it is painful to remember that, though these last two options are perhaps specific to Lemony’s circumstance. 

“We saw him, boss,” said the first lady.

“You saw who?” Olaf asked, in the tone of somebody who had been told who but couldn’t believe who.

“Jacques Snicket,” said the second lady.

“It was definitely him,” said the first.

“He looked just like him,” said the second.

“Shaved his moustache though,” said the first.

“And cut his hair a bit,” said the second. 

“It can’t be him,” said Olaf.

“It was,” said the first lady.

“Who else could it be?” asked the second.

“I’m telling you he looked just like him,” said the first.

“And he was covered in blood,” they both said, at the same time. 

“Is he a _patient_ here?” Olaf asked. “Who dragged him here? He was as good as dead!”

“He wasn’t a patient,” said the second lady.

“He was walking around,” said the first.

“Do you think it was a ghost?” said the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender, sounding mildly excited at the prospect.

“It was not a ghost,” snapped Olaf, sounding nervous. 

“How do you know?” asked the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender. “I heard that if a ghost has unfinished business it roams the land of mortals, tormented and seeking revenge, and searches for the person who—”

“Yes, that’s quite enough!” Olaf said loudly.

“It’s the right setting for a ghost,” concluded the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender.

“It is,” chorused the women. 

“Jacques Snicket has not come back as a ghost,” Olaf said firmly. “If that was the case it would be simple. Just get one of those what do you call its? Weegee boards or whatever. Ask him to go away.”

“I’ve heard the devil comes through those,” said the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender.

“You’ve heard a lot of things, and they’re all non-sensical and mildly demonic,” Olaf snapped. “No. No, this is a bigger issue. If Jacques Snicket is wandering around, we have problems. You’re sure it was him?”

“Looked a lot like him,” said the first woman.

“Unless he has a twin,” put in the second.

“He does, but it’s a woman,” Olaf said thoughtfully. 

“A brother, then,” said the first.

“He has a brother too, but he’s been dead for years.” The sound of fingers drumming against a table. “We’ll have to search the hospital.”

“Every room?” asked the second.

“Every room,” said Olaf, and then added, bitterly, “again.”

“We just did that,” said the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender, sounding sulky. “How will we do it again? There’s no plausy—plausa—plausible-ility.”

“There are murderers lose in the hospital,” Olaf said impatiently, “so we can do whatever we please in the interest of _patient safety_.” More tapping on the table. “Whoever it is, they mean trouble. Anything to do with the blasted Snickets is trouble.”

“Mmhmm,” chorused the women.

“Where’s Esmé?” Olaf asked suddenly. “I need to see if she still has that harpoon gun.” 

There was a time where Lemony and Olaf had been in the drama club together, and they had often shared a stage. In scripts there are notes known as stage directions which are not for the backstage crew but are rather for the actors, so they know that some actions are required as part of their role. A common stage direction is exit, usually with a stipulation, such as _exit stage left_ , or in one memorable play, _exit, pursued by bears_. Had this been a play, Lemony’s character would certainly see the cue to exit at this moment, and this he did, though I am quite sure that Lemony’s exit would have had a stipulation of its own. Perhaps something like _exit, barely avoiding villains out for your blood_.


	9. Chapter 9

Note:  
There was also a time where Lemony and Olaf were something that might have been friends. Certainly there was a time where the Snickets and Olaf were not at odds with one another. Those days seem far away now. It survives only in a handful of old documents, and perhaps one or two photographs.

*

_You alright? You look like you’re about to die. Oops maybe that’s the wrong thing to say. Sorry_  
\- O

**You know we’re not supposed to pass notes in class, right?  
\- L**

_Yeah? and I don’t give a damn  
\- O_

**Well, thank for your concern.  
\- L**

*

O—  
I know we haven’t met very many times at this point, so forgive me if this is a little forward. L doesn’t have many friends at school and while I’m not entirely sure how much you actually like one another, you do at least seem to have a little bit of a rapport going on. At any rate you make him laugh, and I think that’s important during this time period. Not to sound like his mother, but I am worried about him, and I would appreciate it if you kept an eye on him this term. Just while things settle.  
\- K

*

[written in a crude but effective code created by the two correspondents, apparently to stop any intercepted notes from being read to the class.]

_Look in your bag.  
\- O_

**What?  
\- L**

_Not sure I could have made that any clearer?? Your bag. Look in it. quickly, before Mrs Battleaxe gets here.  
\- O_

**…when did you do this?  
\- L**

_Last night. Not being funny Lem but everyone could hear you crying in the bathroom. Figured you weren’t going to get around to your homework and the last thing you need is another detention. I’m fed up of seeing your ugly face in them  
\- O_

**I’m impressed. Usually you don’t even do your own homework.  
\- L**

_Well, you know, what friends are for, blah blah blah. I figured you could use a break._

_Plus I copied off of someone.  
\- O_

**I appreciate the effort. You copied for me. That means a lot.  
\- L**

_Don’t you forget it. now stay the hell out of detention, that’s my time baby  
\- O_

*

J & K,  
I’m pretty sure that you must have put O up to something because he’s being awfully nice to me. He’s still smelly and strange and mostly unpleasant but it’s enjoyable to see some flashes of warmth in him. When I started this letter I thought I was going to be angry that you were trying to baby me but actually the more I try and dredge up any anger the more I realise that it’s actually quite sweet. At the very least I’ve learned that even the most seemingly reprehensible people might have some good in them, which I’m sure was what J was going for.  
I know you’re just looking after me, like Mother and Father would have wanted. It isn’t easy but I think they’d be happy with your efforts. I’m doing alright.  
\- L

*

L,  
Sorry for the slow reply, and the short one – you understand how it is. Kit and I are happy to hear you’re doing the best you can. Remember that’s all we ask of you. Try not to feel too alone out there. We Snickets looks after our own. (Whether they like it or not.)  
\- J

*

_Psst… want a laugh?_  
\- O

**Oh no.  
\- L**

_The look on your face when you read that was priceless. Anyway when old Battleaxe turns around look what I did.  
\- O_

**YOU DO REALISE THAT’S A BIOHAZARD RIGHT  
\- L**

_Hahahaha  
\- O_

**It is a bit funny though.  
\- L**

_If you laugh you’re in cahoots.  
\- O_


	10. Chapter 10

Extensive searches are infuriating because they are extensive, meaning that there are very few places to hide. However, something that Lemony had learned about hiding – and he knew a great deal about it and regarded himself, at this point, as somewhat of an expert – was that people seemed to box themselves in when they thought of a hiding place. They seemed to think that they would have to choose one spot and one spot only, and hide in that single spot until the danger had passed. Now, this might be effective when you are hiding from something that has a disadvantage on you, such as up a tree away from an animal that cannot climb, because the animal will either fail to look up as so many creatures often do or it will lose interest and leave eventually. It might even be effective during a quick search of a large area, such as hiding under the surface of a pond until the authorities have passed. It is not effective when a search is extensive and over a particular area, though, such as when it is a troupe of villains searching a hospital. If Lemony was to pick one place and hide there without moving, it is highly likely that he would eventually be found during a sweep of the area, because people grow increasingly desperate when they are searching fruitlessly for something and they will eventually start looking in all the strangest places, including ones they would have never considered, like spaces far too small for the object or person to be hiding in, or looking up. 

Most of the time it is risky to move while being searched for, because in a closed area it’s likely you will bump into the people hunting you. I would not recommend doing this unless you are very good at hiding, but Lemony is one such person, so his decision to keep moving was a thought-out and effective one. He slipped behind the closest person hunting for him and remained in hiding places they had already searched, moving to the next one as soon as he had the opportunity. Rather like escaping a forest fire by getting ahead of it and lighting a new fire to follow, resulting in the fire always being ahead of you and the one behind you stopping when it reaches the ashes of the new fire and runs out of things to burn, he stayed one step ahead of his pursuers by staying, technically, one step behind them. He was able to do this for the entire time they were searching for him, until the whole mission was temporarily put on hold by the attempted murder of poor Violet Baudelaire, who apparently needed to have her head surgically removed. 

In what he would consider his one saving grace in this whole uncharacteristic mess, Lemony did pause for a moment and wonder if he should intervene. He could have done so, even if he didn’t have a plan – the mere sight of him would have certainly thrown Olaf and Esmé off, and if those two were knocked off track the entire scheme would follow. He decided that it was impossible for him, though – he brought too many dangers of his own and could not possible expose the Baudelaire children to yet more danger, nor could he risk confirming he was alive to that many people. His research reassured him that the Baudelaires were intelligent and resourceful children, and that they had escaped far worse than this before. Finally he comforted himself with that fact that if he managed to get adequate revenge on Olaf, a lot of the children’s problems would be solved anyway. This is a curious feature of revenge, I think – the idea that such an inherently selfish mission can be justified by the good it would do the rest of the world if that person was gone, or incapacitated, or exposed. It is another one of those strange paradoxes we come across in our time as volunteers: when is bad, good? 

With the rest of the hospital excited for a surgical show Lemony made his way back to the Library of Records. With Olaf accounted for for the foreseeable future it was impossible for Lemony to ignore the fact that he was a researcher, and that he was researching something highly specific, and that there was a lot of mysteries afoot, and that Jacques had most certainly said there might be a survivor of the fire. The Library of Records, even while completely turned upside-down, a phrase here meaning _absolutely, irrevocably, undeniably, inconveniently trashed_ , was still perhaps one of the most valuable resources available, and if Lemony excelled at one thing it would surely be finding coherent notes in a chaotic and often smouldering environment, though the Library of Records would not be smouldering for a short while yet. 

It was undoubtedly a tense period of time, short though it was, and its unpleasantness was broken only by the request over the intercom from a strange female voice for one Hal to assist one Dr Faustus with some surgical paperwork – Dr Faustus, Lemony thought correctly, undoubtedly being Klaus, because unbeknown to him his father had often used the same name when doctor disguises were necessary and Lemony supposed it was only natural that his son’s mind would select that name as the first one, too. It was a touching moment made bitter around the edges by the desire Lemony had to tell Klaus this little piece of information about his father, knowing it would bring him comfort and a sense of closeness with his late parent, and the knowledge that he could do no such thing. Despite this it did mean one thing for certain – the Baudelaires had a plan, if a loose one, but looser plans had gotten people through worse. 

This time Lemony was sitting behind a pile of overturned filing cabinets when the door burst open, the newcomer making no attempt to enter discretely. The footsteps paid no attention to the rest of the room and instead crossed to the south wall, a direction that sent an unpleasant shiver of recognition through Lemony as he remembered what he had seen there merely hours ago. Staying low to the ground he moved quietly closer, wanting to see who it was, perhaps half-hoping that it might be the Baudelaires seizing a chance for themselves – and by extension, Lemony – to get answers. What he saw was both good and bad, meaning that the tape being viewed was indeed the tape that had been viewed earlier, and therefore precisely the one that Lemony had hoped for, but also meaning that the tape was not in the hands of the Baudelaires but rather in the hands of Count Olaf, who was watching with a murderous expression.

Lemony stood slowly, feeling oddly breathless. He was sure that Olaf’s attention would be completely focused on the tape, and it was undeniable that this was the moment he had been waiting for. In all his loose plans, Lemony had been hoping for a situation that was precisely this one – Olaf, alone, distracted, and as a bonus, with his back to him. There was no entirely convenient weapon to hand, such as a harpoon gun or perhaps poison darts, which was a shame because the sudden and unexpected nature of them would be ideal for such a situation, but there were a lot of fallen filing cabinets and, brought down with them, parts of the intricate file input system that spat files out into numerous waiting trolleys. As he stepped closer, Lemony spotted such a piece, safely in reach and looking pleasantly heavy. If he could pick it up and step just a few feet closer, he would be in prime position to strike Olaf in the back of the head with it, and he was sure with a weapon so heavy, once would be all it would take. 

It has been said that simple plans are always the best, because there is less to go wrong. This is entirely true. However, the fault of every plan, no matter how complicated or how simple, is that they can never account for sudden and unexpected changes of circumstance. For example, if you were planning to assassinate an influential figure, and you had spent months and months of preparation inserting a time bomb into his private jet, and then on the day of the assassination a thunderstorm rolled in on what was supposed to be a clear and sunny day, grounding the person’s flight and resulting in the bomb exploding harmlessly in a grounded, empty jet, would that be your fault? Would it be a case of poor planning on your part, and could your fellow revolutionaries – or terrorists, depending on the side a person is on – hold you responsible for the failure? The answer should, of course, be no, because there was no way that any of you could have predicted the thunderstorm would appear on that day, or at that precise moment, and altering the timer on the bomb while not knowing what, precisely, you were altering it for would be careless and likely result in unavoidable failure. Instead you had no choice but to act to the best of your ability and using the variables that you could confirm: he was going to be on his private jet that day, at that time he would be in the air, etc. You accepted that it might not work because of variables unknown as part of the risk of a plan – all plans have them. No plan is ever guaranteed to work, no matter how simple they are. The plans with the best chance of success are the ones that are simple and formed quickly, giving less a chance to go wrong and less time for variables to interfere, but of course even these plans can be foiled by circumstance at times. 

Even with that in mind it is difficult to believe that a plan as simple as Lemony’s could fail at this final and crucial stage. All it involved was enough time to hit a person over the head with a heavy metal bar, while that person was sitting completely distracted and with his back to his potential assailant. Sometimes it seems that things only occur in life just to remind you that they can, and this was certainly one of those time. Yes, it was not likely that such a simple plan could fail, but yes, it was still theoretically possible: all of this was illustrated by the sudden, angered shout that Olaf let out seconds before Lemony could go through with his plan, a yell let out while simultaneously jumping from his seat and knocking the projector onto its side. 

It is painful for me to try and put words to what happened next, though I am not sure if it would be more painful than trying to chronicle how my friend and mentor murdered a man in cold blood before a large projection of a brother who would have never considered such things. Thankfully I will never have to find out how I would attempt to do that, but in its place I have to attempt to put words to how Lemony felt as the projector tipped over, and as the tape containing his brother’s image was corrupted and began to blur and then flicker and finally to burn as the film came into contact with the heated projector and caught alight. Film tapes, as we know, are highly flammable and catch fire easily and burn quickly; if action is not taken immediately they will soon become a fire of dangerous size. The Library of Records contained thousands of these volatile film devices, now scattered across the floor from overturned cabinets, and with the film now smoking in the projector a terrible fire was imminent. Olaf, of course, had no intention of stopping the flames, but Lemony might have been able to act quickly enough to extinguish it had he not been frozen in place, watching the image projected in front of him break up and blacken around the edges and finally, with a flash, erase his brother’s face completely. 

For a moment both Lemony and Olaf were completely unaware of one another. It is indescribably cruel how Olaf turned first, seeing Lemony standing feet from him and, in a reversal of Lemony’s earlier advantage, surprising him. Olaf looked at him for a moment, registering both confusion and annoyance, and then finally spoke.

“You’re not Jacques Snicket.”

“No,” Lemony said, because it was true. “I suppose your accomplices were wrong on that.”

“Hmm.” For a moment it was unclear whether or not he recognised him. “I thought you were dead. I rather hoped, actually.” He regarded him with a thin smile. “Oh well. I suppose one out of two isn’t bad.”

Anger can distort time. Lemony was convinced that he had swung the bar instantly, but clearly there had been a split second delay because Olaf managed to duck, causing the bar to hit the projector instead, which promptly burst into more furious flames. Lemony stared at it for a moment, registering that it certainly was not good, and ordinarily he might have still tried to put it out but this was not an ordinary situation. Olaf was already halfway to the door and Lemony went after him instead, now without the metal bar or any kind of weapon, only vaguely aware of the fact that he could be running into a trap. None of that mattered anymore. 

The hospital corridors were still deserted and they ran at speed down the halls. It became clear that, at least for the moment, Olaf had no plan either. It is only a small comfort that Lemony’s appearance had shocked him somewhat, and he can hardly be blamed for it – the reappearance of anybody who you sincerely believe to be dead is always a jarring one. Several times they each almost gained the upper hand: Lemony almost caught him with a well-twisted firehose, with no idea of the fact that it would have made the second time Olaf fell foul to such a trick in almost as many days; Olaf bought himself some time via a tactical use of hospital beds, which resulted in a severely bruised shin for Lemony – a negligible injury during normal times, but a highly inconvenient one when chasing somebody. For this reason he briefly lost him but only for a few minutes, as his voice coming over the intercom quickly pinpointed his position, and Lemony, remembering his wandering around the hospital during his brief career as a janitor, headed him off.

Supplies are never far away in hospitals, even if they’re not what you need. In this case they weren’t exactly what Lemony needed but they were quick and available and good enough – the human body is not picky when it comes to the substances that can kill it. Weapons are often a careful balance between ingenuity and cruelty, and the materials were simple: a disposable syringe for giving shots, a slim plastic tube discarded from some packaging, and some of the foul disinfectant he didn’t think he would stop smelling. The disinfectant was sucked into the syringe, the syringe pushed just past the top of the plastic tube, and all that was left was to hope this plan worked.

The time it had taken him to fix together the improvised weapon had given Olaf just enough time to reach that area of the hospital. All Lemony had to do was step out at the right moment and take the shot, but that seemed a simple idea when he didn’t factor in the rapidly spreading smoke, and the crowds of people he could hear hurrying closer. If he didn’t act soon he was going to have to prioritise getting out of the building, and he knew beyond all doubt that he would lose Olaf if that was the case. He stepped out into the hallway, already turning a light grey with the smoke, and, hearing the loud voices behind him, quickly moved forward instead.

It had been the right direction but also, as is the case with many of these situations, also the wrong one. It was correct because he had moved away from the crowd of people who by the sounds of things appeared to be chasing a wheeled bed, and it was correct because it brought him right to Count Olaf who, in a rare occasion, was actually the person somebody wanted to find. It was the wrong decision, however, because it involved a right-angled bend in the hall, and therefore when they saw one another Lemony was far too close to use the weapon as intended, and Olaf had always been slightly quicker at recovering from surprises. 

“Ah!” he yelled, jumping back, and then, “oh. It’s you.” He looked him up and down and then looked back at his face, raising his eyebrow. “Excuse me? That’s what you say, isn’t it? Or perhaps, get out of my way.”

“I suppose you’re in a hurry to get out,” Lemony replied. “Did you hear, somebody started a fire?”

“I did hear about that, actually,” Olaf said, crossing one arm across his chest and, with the other, raising a finger to tap thoughtfully at his chin. “As a matter of fact, I heard it was you.”

“Of course you did,” Lemony said. “It always is, apparently.”

The voices in the hallway were growing closer, but were now clearly absent from the accompanying rattling of a runaway bed. At first they sounded as though they were in the next hallway, but then abruptly they were even louder, echoing loudly enough that Lemony wouldn’t be able to hear anything Olaf said unless he shouted, which it turned out was what he did.

“Over here!” he yelled, again speaking in that strange, untraceable accent he’d adopted. “It turns out those murderous orphans had an accomplice, and here he is!”

“You know I’m getting fed up of taking the fall for every literal and figurative fire you start,” Lemony hissed, stepping a little closer.

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Olaf said, grinning, before raising his voice again. “Quickly, grab him!”

The crowd was going to be a problem. They were rapidly heading for him and Lemony had enough experience with mobs to know it was useless trying to reason with them. In his moment of consideration Olaf slipped past; Lemony half turned, trying to keep an eye on both him and the mob, and then briefly turned back to the crowd as he heard a familiar voice.

“I know him!” cried Hal. “It’s Jan E. Tor, the janitor!”

Olaf stopped and turned, staring at Lemony in disbelief. “ _Jan E. Tor_?” he repeated, his lip curling slightly.

“Oh, that’s right,” Lemony shot back, turning to stare at him properly. “I forgot I was in the spotlight of such genius as _Dr. Medical School_.”

Olaf glared; if he was going to say anything else there was no opportunity. It seemed that this mob was the most common type of mob, meaning that it was loud and angry and highly susceptible to ideas and accusations presented with no proof. Olaf seemed to be aware that his best chance of escaping would be to leave Lemony in their care; he shook his head and then looked at them again, pointing an accusing finger at Lemony.

“Hurry up! He’s just told me he’s got an _oily rag_ in his pocket.”

His pocket! Temporarily distracted, Lemony had forgotten all about it. He quickly put his hand in his pocket and realised it had given him an unforeseen advantage; the crowd gasped and fell back slightly, fearful, and Lemony seized the opportunity for all he had. Pulling out the makeshift weapon he quickly raised it to his lips and blew once, hard, down the tube. As he had hoped, the syringe was dislodged and flew an impressive distance down the hall, but seconds too late; Olaf was just out of its range. Instead of embedding itself deep enough in his body to do damage it was slowed by the thick material of his lab coat, a garment which was also disgustingly dirty – a disadvantage to someone who cared about being seen in crusty and smelly clothing but certainly an advantage to somebody trying not to be pierced by a syringe containing harmful fluid. It had been close enough that he felt it, and somehow Lemony wasn’t quite expecting his reaction.

He reached behind him, plucking out the syringe, and looked at it quickly, rolling it between finger and thumb and then staring at Lemony. There are some expressions which we can write paragraphs and paragraphs upon, trying to organise all of their hidden depths and subtle meanings, and then there are expressions which we can sum up with just one word. In this case, Olaf’s expression was of the latter type, and his expression could be summed up with this single word: _hate_.

Behind them, a large fireball had escaped from the lift shaft and scattered the crowd. Lemony remembered feeling the heat on his back but strangely he had heard nothing from the crowd; no running, no screaming. The fire had been channelled up another hallway but had stared more small fires in its wake, and if Lemony had looked behind him at the main joining corridor he would have seen rooms ablaze, beds and curtains blackening. It was growing harder to breathe, and vaguely he thought he should try to get out, but something held him rooted to the spot.

Olaf threw the syringe to the ground, lifted a finger, pointed it at him. His hand seemed to tremble and he pulled it back, wiping the back of his hand against his mouth. Another pause, and then he let out a bark of laughter.

“I should have known!” he said, stepping closer. “I should have known! You don’t change your methods, do you, Snicket?”

“Why change a method if it works?” Lemony asked coldly, and was met by only a smile. 

A flicker of movement at the edge of his vision: Lemony managed to dodge to the side just in time to see a small scalpel barely miss his head, and just as quickly had to dodge to the other side as something similar followed it. He pressed himself against the wall and dodged again, swapping their positions – with Olaf now closer to the fire and Lemony with the clearer hallway he supposed he should try and run, but he didn’t dare turn his back when Olaf had countless other small, sharp projectiles. He needed a way to get behind him again, but the only other exits on the hallway were bedrooms and the supply closet he had been in earlier. If he backed up quickly he could maybe duck into it and lure Olaf in; it would be easy to double back around among the shelves. 

“Run out of things to fire at me already?” Olaf asked, still keeping pace with him. “Guess you missed your mark this time. I suppose we can’t all be lucky. So now what? Did your brother set you up to this? Seems unlikely. You know, right up until the very end, he was _so convinced_ that he could find some common ground with me! You know what he’s like. Always… _waxing poetic_ about the good in the world and doing noble deeds and blah blah blah. He doesn’t seem the revenge type, but that’s hardly an answer. Quite unbelievable that you would come out of nowhere and come after me just because… well, because what? Because you wanted to? Because I hit a nerve?” He smiled. “What a nerve that must have been. So what now? You can’t possibly come all the way here to just give up.”

Between the smoke and the anger Lemony could barely breathe. It was difficult to hear, too – the roar of the flames was getting louder, or maybe that was just the blood in his ears. He saw another flash of silver and ducked this time, sending the small knife flying over his head instead; a few more rapid steps backwards and he had snatched it up himself, sending it right back where it had come from. His aim had always been decent, and Olaf wasn’t quite as fast. The knife sliced against the hand he used to bat it away, causing great drops of blood to splash against the grimy once-white floors.

Olaf stared at it, momentarily stunned, and Lemony seized his chance. 

He had never been one for physical fights, and indeed he was not very good at them. The most he ever fought was to get away; the idea that he might throw himself at someone in an attempt to start a fight would have been, up until moments ago, unfathomable to him. Still, anger and hatred are powerful emotions and they can make us do ridiculous things, such as go on the hunt for risky, cold-blooded revenge, or tackle somebody more villainous and more heavily armed than you are while a building burns down around you, rather than, say, escaping said building. Even as they both toppled to the floor Lemony could barely believe he was doing it, and of the fight he couldn’t remember much. He knew from examining himself later that he had taken a few blows himself, but at the same time he had known from Olaf’s appearance that it had been rather mutual. It appeared they were relatively evenly matched when Lemony was so agitated, and perhaps if they hadn’t been interrupted by an unfair advantage on Olaf’s side it might have been anyone’s guess who would have won. Either way, one person would have emerged victorious and undoubtedly left the other dead: during such fights, it is quite clear that nobody is fighting just to teach somebody a lesson. The idea that he may have killed Olaf so personally was one that Lemony would often come back to, wondering just where that left him – for some reason the idea of killing him via an improvised poison dart made from a syringe filled with disinfectant was not as horrific as killing him with his hands, even though arguably the disinfectant death would be worse. Lemony would never get the chance to know that about himself, though, because at that moment a pair of hooks seized him under the arms and hauled him upwards, digging in painfully, and Lemony found himself dazed and breathless from the smoke. 

“Do you need a hand, boss?” the Hook Handed Man asked, and Olaf stumbled to his feet, spitting blood to the floor and then looking at him.

“ _A hand?_ ” he asked, looking at the hooks, and spat again. “Bring him over here.”

Lemony was not usually so easy to manhandle around, but physical injury combined with smoke inhalation is a terrible combination, and when that is added to the experience of having sharp hooks digging into your body it becomes a situation stacked highly against you. The storage room was slightly less smoky but not by much, and any air that Lemony managed to get was knocked out of him when he was slammed against one of the large metal shelves hard enough to make the entire heavy piece of furniture rattle. 

“You know what these are?” Olaf asked, dangling a pair of handcuffs in front of Lemony’s face. The Hook Handed Man kept him pinned against the shelf; Lemony had to follow Olaf with his eyes.

“Handcuffs,” he answered, and a flash of annoyance passed over Olaf’s face though Lemony could not possibly think why.

“You Snickets always were show-offs,” he muttered, and Lemony blinked.

“I hardly think knowing what handcuffs are constitutes being a—”

“Quiet!” Olaf snapped. “Do you know who they belonged to?”

Lemony didn’t have an answer for that one. Olaf grabbed his left wrist, wrenching it roughly upwards and clipping one of the cuffs around it. 

“You’re not going to cuff me to you or something awful like that, are you?” Lemony asked. 

“Oh, no. Much worse.”

“I strongly doubt that.”

Olaf glared at him, simultaneously clipping the other handcuff around one of the vertical support poles of the shelf. At his nod the Hook Handed Man stepped back, and Lemony didn’t have to even try his restraints to know that the shelf was heavy enough to hold him, no matter what he tried to do. 

“You never answered my question,” Olaf said, folding his arms across his chest. Lemony noticed one hand was still bleeding heavily. “Do you know who these handcuffs belonged to?”

Lemony remained silent, though he had the sneaking suspicion he knew what Olaf was going to say.

“Jacques Snicket,” Olaf said, pronouncing the syllables slowly. “Your dear brother. He tried them on me first, and look how that worked out for him! Tell me,” he said, stepping a little closer so he could lower his voice slightly despite the noise of the approaching fire, “what do you think he would make of this? You’re trapped by the very things he used to do whatever good and noble nonsense he was doing, and now they’re going to ensure you burn to death. How fitting.”

For the first time since Lemony had seen him, some of the anger began to subside, replaced by cold dread. Olaf stepped away, walking backwards towards the door, the Hook Handed Man just ahead. 

“Two Snickets, one… uh… stone,” Olaf said, frowning. “Or two brothers, one… highly ironic use of handcuffs.”

“Two birds, one stone,” the Hook Handed Man whispered.

“Two birds, one handcuff,” Olaf snapped, waving a hand. “It hardly matters.”

They reached the door and he paused.

“Goodbye, Snicket,” he said, his grin a flash of teeth, and vanished.


	11. Chapter 11

Note:

Even the best of us have been accused of starting a fire. Literally or figuratively, it hardly matters – such things stick with you. It is something I know all too well. I do not know why I feel the need to disclose this information in such an official manner, nor do I know what is compelling me to actually go through with this desire, but if I try to analyse what I might be thinking the same way I try to make sense of what Lemony might have been experiencing I suspect that my aim is this:

For you to be reading these words I assume that you must have a manner of trust in me. I do not know this but I like to believe it, because I find it difficult to know otherwise why you would be wasting your time with what I have to say. I do not, however, know what your opinions of Lemony might be. If you trust me, and I have been accused of such things, perhaps you will believe me when I say that Lemony did not start that fire, and in fact many fires he has been accused of starting – both literal and figurative ones – have also not been him. 

Or perhaps I am simply trying to absolve myself.

*

L—  
Despite what the newspapers, general public, law enforcement, night shift staff, strangers at bus stops, and volunteers from both sides are saying: I did not start that fire. Also I am not dead. Obviously.  
\- D

*

D,  
I am glad to hear you’re alive, primarily because I was worried but also because I am suspected of your murder. Hopefully we can get this cleared up, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  
\- L

*

**HOTEL FIRE ARSONIST BELIEVED DEAD, POLICE CLAIM  
“We haven’t found a body, but you know how it is with fires. It’s hot. It’s like a free cremation,” says detective in charge.**

The fire that gutted Bedd & Staines Inn over the weekend has been confirmed as arson, police claim.

“It was definitely arson,” said a police spokesperson on Monday. “Absolutely. Undoubtedly. You can tell because of the damning evidence of someone being seen starting the fire.”

Police investigators worked tirelessly to find the culprit and finally identified him through eyewitness descriptions and an anonymous letter speaking ill of the suspect’s character and claiming that it was highly likely something like arson would be in his nature. The accused is one Mr Despard Shelley, age 16, and as no information regarding his escape has come forward it is believed that Mr Shelley perished in the blaze. His is the only fatality. 

“I always knew there was something off about that boy,” said an old neighbour who did not wish to be named. “I used to see him prowling around in my property, and who knows what he was planning on doing! Well, he was sort of in my property. He got close enough so I’d spray him with my hose and he always used to tell me that wasn’t nice. Used to say it with such a dark tone, you never knew what he was thinking. Sure, he was only four then, but that’s old enough to start a fire. Hey, do you know what I just remembered? The Shelley house burned down when that kid was about 10, maybe 11 years old? Both the parents died. Staring to wonder if this isn’t a pattern.”

At the time of the blaze the hotel was being used to host a function for hundreds of the city’s most influential people, including artists, doctors, teachers, scientists, writers, actors, and removals men. The highlight of the evening was supposed to be a large charity auction but the hotel was evacuated thanks to an anonymous advance warning only minutes before the blaze grew out of control. Everyone attending the function, plus all of the other guests, survived. The expensive items up for sale were lost in the fire, or were perhaps stolen.

“I did see several people loading a lot of stuff into the back of a truck,” said a witness. “But that was probably nothing.”

What is to be done with the remains of the hotel, which was completely destroyed in the blaze, remains undecided.

*

Vasiliy & Fionnuala,

Ironically I’ll be burning this page after I write it because I know I can never send it, but it’s nice to write your names.

I don’t know what you must think of me. I saw you both that night and I know you must think I have something to do with it. I don’t blame you, because it did look highly suspicious. I vanish, we don’t see one another for years, and all you know is that I’ve vanished along with somebody else who is apparently in the habit of starting fires, though that is also a false accusation. Lemony and I are not trying to start any of those. Perhaps one day I can explain. 

I’m already getting off track. I know how it looks. I do. But I want you to know I didn’t do it. I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t. I hope and hope that you know me better than that.

I was the one who called in the warning. Am I guilty for knowing even that much? I don’t know. But it wasn’t me.  
\- Despard

*

D,

I hope you’re not finding laying low too unenjoyable. I would say that you get used to it, but you don’t, not really. You get used to the days with nothing to fill them, and you get used to the paranoia and the stress and the constantly looking over your shoulder – even if it never goes away it becomes the background radiation to your life rather than something that is constantly overwhelming. You get used to all of that, but you don’t get used to having to sit helplessly by and watch as people believe a version of yourself that you are not.

Truth. Truth will always prevail, even if it takes a long time and even if you are not alive to see it. On days where it feels far too dark, where it feels that the entire world is against you, trust in truth. If even one person believes you, you will be alright.  
\- L


	12. Chapter 12

If you have ever found yourself handcuffed to a heavy metal shelf in a burning building, with the room filling rapidly with smoke and the fire creeping ever closer, you will probably remember just how hopeless the situation feels. Handcuffs are notoriously difficult to escape from, which is understandable considering their primary use, and burning buildings are very deadly. Lemony tried in vain to twist his hand out of the metal cuff despite being fully aware of its futility, but he felt he had to try absolutely everything available to him before he gave up entirely. The smoke quickly made it difficult to breathe and Lemony crouched down, just able to sit on the floor even though it caused him to have to sit with his arm uncomfortably stretched above him. He kept his face as low to the floor as possible and tried to think, but if he were honest with himself, the situation looked dire. He did not expect to make it out. 

It is difficult to think when in a high-stress situation, and not many people can do such a thing easily. Those who can are often snapped up into high-stress careers like surgeons, soldiers, emergency personnel, volunteer fire departments, and expensive cutthroat businesses, and while the rest of us might have the capacity for such a thing we are often fortunate enough to never have to work it out. Some of us might be able to pull it off once, but it can often leave damaging psychological scars that are beyond our control. It is one thing to go into a career because you enjoy the rush and you feel comfortable in such a situation – maybe you even feel like your best self – but it is quite another to have such a situation thrust upon you without your consent and then be left to clean up the mess.

This was not the first high-stress situation that Lemony had ever been in, and as a matter of fact he is one of those people who finds it easy to think during such risk. It is an accepted part of what he does, and I daresay if he didn’t possess this quality he would likely not have made it as long as he has. However, this was a situation entirely outside of his control, that he did not consent to: he accepted the obvious risks when he decided to carry out his loose plan, but he did not expect a burning building, and he certainly did not expect to be trapped inside one, secured to a heavy shelf by his lost brother’s handcuffs. It would be alarming enough even if he had considered the risk, but the advantage would have been that he had time to prepare for it. To be thrust into any situation with no time to mentally prepare is always unpleasant, but when the situation is one like this it is infinitely worse. 

I do not know what Lemony thought about while briefly incapacitated by grief and shock, but I did see the shadows of it on his face for some time afterwards and I can therefore hazard a guess. It is common knowledge that Lemony lost the woman he loved to a fire, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that this fact was not far from his mind as he crouched there, breathing as little as possible and feeling the heat in the room steadily rise. I, too, have lost people I love dearly to fire, and I know what I would have been thinking as I waited there: is this similar to what they experienced? Did they have time to be scared? Did they have time to panic? Did the smoke get them first, or did they have to experience the flames? Did they have the breath to scream? None of these are questions you want to ask about somebody you love, but it is the darker nature of human curiosity to wonder these things when faced with a similar situation. Perhaps we are subconsciously trying to feel closer to them, or perhaps we are using what we believe to be our last moments to finally get the answers to the questions that have tormented us for so long. As I’m sure Lemony realised, sometimes the questions are best left unanswered. 

It was while he was crouched there that Lemony began to take note of the various things in the room with him. Despite his grief and the tears cutting tracks through the ash settling on his face he realised that he had to escape, or he had to at least try, and while he had never been handcuffed in a burning building before he had been captive many times, and he had always escaped then. All it would take was a little clever thinking, and he was surrounded by objects that could be of use. The major disadvantage was the time constraints. He did not know how much longer he had until he suffocated. 

The storage room was filled with the clutter of hospital life, though there seemed to be no order to it: administrative supplies sat side by side with cleaning supplies, which were next to surgical supplies. Perhaps Lemony wished at this point that Olaf had secured him with rope or something cuttable instead, because there were plenty of scalpels, but that would do him no good with metal. He would need a large saw and a lot of time, or something hot enough to buckle the metal and weaken it. 

The idea settled. The one thing he was not short of was something very hot. 

He looked around again, squinting through the thickening smoke to see what was in reach. Next to him was an old overhead projector, with packages of printing paper stacked on it. There were boxes of elastic bands, half of an anatomical skeleton, several boxes of pencils, a large mirror used for overhead views in an operating theatre, a packet of highlighters, endless clipboards, several half-used cans of white paint that Lemony had seen no evidence of being used on the walls, and a smaller can of paint stripper, which in Lemony’s opinion the hospital could have used as well. All of it would be quite useful for many things, but he was unsure of what good it could do him in this situation – especially as on the other side of the room, nicely out of his reach, was a large pair of bolt-cutters. 

Lemony quickly had a plan, but like all of his recent plans it was loose and dangerous and would likely result in his death. Sometimes it is necessary to take a chance, however slim, because it means we are not simply sitting there waiting for the inevitable: if we get an opportunity to increase our chances of survival from zero per cent to five per cent, we are going to do it, despite its apparent futility, and despite the fact that its failure might make our situation worse. In Lemony’s case, this meant something along the lines of _instead of dying relatively peacefully of smoke inhalation, he could instead end up setting himself alight._ It was a risk he decided he had to take. I suppose the thought of dying like that, immobilised by his brother’s handcuffs, was simply far worse than any other option. Perhaps he thought that if he died because of his own failed plan, it would be different from allowing the same man who had done such a terrible thing to his brother to do something terrible to him, too.

He reached out with a leg and managed to kick a can of paint closer. Lifting it, he realised it wasn’t heavy enough for his purpose, but the other one was. Dragging it closer, he took it awkwardly in one hand and hurled it with as much strength as he could at the large surgical mirror. It cracked the glass in a large spiderweb and sent it clattering to the floor, knocking several large pieces of the mirror out. Lemony stretched as much as he could and grabbed the largest piece he could reach. Taking a deep breath of the cleanest air he could find, he stood up, hunched slightly in the thicker smoke, and set the glass aside for a moment, turning his attention instead to the overhead projector.

I am not sure if they use these devices in schools any more, but in case you are unsure, they are large and very clunky devices consisting of a glass bottom and an extendable arm at the end of which is an enclosed mirror. A special sheet of laminate paper is placed on the glass bottom and lit from beneath, and the angled mirrors above it project the image onto a wall or whiteboard. The interest for Lemony was, of course, those adjustable mirrors. Lemony reached out and pulled the arm closer, twisting the mirrors at the top so they would be facing down. In order to accurately project the sheets of writing the right way around, there are usually several different angles of mirror inside such a device, and these themselves can be altered slightly to form the best image. Lemony adjusted these so that some mirrors remained pointing at him, and the others off to the side. After a few more moments of adjusting the entire projector, he figured it was as close as he was going to get it. 

Taking the piece of mirror again, he crouched down, looking up and positioning himself. This part of the plan was ready: now it was time for the riskier part, the most dreaded and anticipated part of all plans where one sees whether one is a genius or an imbecile. The lines, I’ve found, are often indiscernible, a phrase which here means _so close and finely blurred that it can be reasonable assumed that all imbeciles have a stroke of genius, and all geniuses have a stroke of imbecile._ Lemony reached out his leg and kicked at the paint stripper. It almost bounced out of his reach, but he slumped down and tried again and this time kicked it closer. Using his foot, he dragged it towards him, and finally reached out and grabbed it.

I often wonder what he must have thought, sitting in that smoky room with the fire beginning to flicker in the hallway outside. There he was, sitting cross-legged in a room about to be engulfed in flames of his own making, with nothing to defend himself with aside from a broken shard of mirror and a rickety old projector. I am sure he looked at the paint stripper and wondered just what he was doing, and if it wouldn’t be better to let himself leave this earth in a far more peaceful way, and then I am sure that he much have thought again about what had compelled him to try this plan in the first place, and again decided that he had to make an attempt. It was, he told me later, while sitting fully clothed in my bathtub with the shower on, soaking wet and miserably eating a pudding cup, the third-worst half hour of his life. He did not say what the first or second one was, and I did not ask, but I can guess.

Whatever went through his head he came out of the other side knowing he had to try. He unscrewed the can of paint stripped and pushed himself as far away from where he would be sitting as possible, which, as you can imagine, was barely any distance at all. He weighed the can in his hand, looked towards the door, and then threw it with a slight twisting motion. The can sailed a short distance through the air, landed, wobbled, almost landed right-side up and ruined everything, and then tipped onto its side and rolled out of the door, spilling a trail of its contents as it went. Paint stripper, as we know, is highly flammable, and so the idea of Lemony sending a trail of it directly into the flames, leading right back to where he was sitting still relatively sheltered from the fire, seems preposterous. Lemony quickly pushed himself as far back from the spilled liquid as possible, getting back into position under the projector, and to anybody who didn’t know of his plan it would have looked utterly ridiculous. But really, inviting the fire directly into the room was the only chance he had. For his plan to work, he needed the fire to be close enough for him to get a correct angle, and it needed to be condensed enough that there was something to focus on. 

Within seconds, the fire in the hallway had latched on to the new fuel and raced up the trail, causing the storeroom to erupt with a burst of heat and smoke. Lemony winced, shielding his face, and then cautiously peeked. It was hot enough that he could already feel his clothing sticking to his back, the air especially difficult to breathe, but he knew this was his only chance. Soon the flames would spread to the things stacked on the shelf and there would be too much of it to focus; he had to act now. 

Fire is always hottest at its base, and if you look closely you might be able to see a purple or blue flame at the very base of a fire. Sometimes the fire gets hot enough that this can be a bright white colour, and with how flammable the paint stripper was, this fire was easily hot enough at its base for that little white glow. In the puddle where the paint stripper had initially spilled before it started to roll, this white spot was largest, and it was this spot that Lemony angled his mirror shard at. With some adjusting, and with his hand uncomfortably close to the flame, he managed to direct its light first into the mirror angled down from the projector, and from that one, into the mirror angled to the side. He immediately knew that he had at least angled everything right: his wrist was immediately uncomfortably warm, and within another second, painfully hot. 

He had briefly considered the fact that he would not be able to warm the metal this much without burning himself, but such sacrifices have to be made in these situations. Still, he had underestimated how painful it would be; it was difficult for him to keep the mirror steady, and every time he flinched or moved, the light would redirect, losing valuable time. For a long moment it looked as though the plan simply wouldn’t work, and the pain become so great that Lemony was forced to take a moment, wondering how he could possibly go on. Several of the chains linking the bracelet around his wrist to the one around the shelf were now glowing, and his hand already looked terribly red. The light was currently directed more onto the shelf than the cuff, making it glow with heat too, and Lemony knew that every second was a second wasted but there are unavoidable limits to pain. 

I have often said that loose plans can fail, no mater how simple they are and no matter how little time you give circumstance to foil them. This plan was not simple but it was sudden, and variables were low, but even in such cases something unexpected can happen that changes everything. Usually such things are bad news, foiling a plan or making it much more difficult that it has any right to be. In this case it was a very good thing indeed, because as Lemony slumped there, in pain and about to give up, the heat now directed at the shelf revealed that the shelf was made out of a very cheap metal, or rather, several cheap metals blended together, and its tolerance for heat was much lower. As Lemony looked up, preparing to try one final time, he could see the metal had warped, starting to twist out of its usual shape. He tugged his arm. The shelf bent with him. He tugged again, feeling something on the verge of giving. He tried one final time, as hard as he could, equal parts hope and desperation, and with a loud clatter the thin support beam of the shelf buckled, snapping and releasing the other half of the handcuffs and sending everything on it toppling to the floor where, in another lucky twist, several large packets of printer paper landed on the closest flames, extinguishing the worst of the heat for a brief moment. As they began to crackle and burn, much slower, Lemony shook himself out of his shock that his plan had actually worked, and moved for his only reasonable exit: the window. 

The relief he must have felt when he crawled, coughing, out of the small window and fell the couple of feet to the scaffolding below must have been indescribable. I am sure he lay there for several moments, looking up at the scaffolding above him and the glint of stars visible, wondering if it was all real. The cool night air must have felt wonderous after the heat, and while he was coughing painfully and violently it was still a wonderful feeling to have clean air to breathe. After a few moments of recovery he rolled over, crawling on his hands and knees away from the burning building, going only as quickly as he dared. He was still several storeys above the ground and incredibly dizzy from the smoke, and it was an incredibly disorientating feeling to be crawling along a narrow unlit walkway apparently suspended in nothingness. Ordinarily it would have been an alarming situation, but compared to his previous surroundings I’m sure this was, by comparison, a walk in the park. 

As relief so often does in such situations, it did not last long. No sooner had Lemony considered standing and attempting to find a way to climb down did he hear scuffling from above him, indistinct voices, and then suddenly somebody was climbing into view and of course it was the person that he wanted to see least. 

If it was any consolation, Olaf looked as though he felt the exact same way. He had shed the doctor disguise now and looked rather disgruntled, probably due to the inconvenience of escaping a burning building, though it goes without saying that he had had an easier time of such a thing than Lemony. There was, however, some sense of satisfaction at the look of shock, and then disappointment, and then anger on his face, and it gave Lemony the steadiness he needed to get to his feet. For a moment the two of them could only stare at one another.

“You’re not supposed to be alive!” Olaf eventually snapped.

“I hear that a lot,” Lemony replied, his voice slightly hoarse from smoke. 

Olaf’s eyes travelled down to the handcuffs, still secured around Lemony’s wrist. “How did you manage that, then? I did say you were all show-offs.”

“There’s always a way, even if it doesn’t seem like it,” Lemony said, coughing. “Of course you’d know nothing about that, always going for the lowest common denominator.”

“The lowest what now?” Olaf asked, as Lemony continued to cough. “You should see a doctor about that cough. Shame the hospital’s burning down.”

“Darling, who are you talking to?” Esmé’s voice, calling down from the floor above. “I told you I can’t get down here on my own in these heels.”

“Maybe you should have worn more appropriate footwear, _darling_ ,” Olaf called back, rolling his eyes.

“Maybe you can help me like you said you would! Who is that?”

“It’s that annoying Snicket man.”

“I thought we killed him.”

“No, the other one.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Me too,” Olaf said grimly. “Me too.”

I want to say that Lemony finally got what he wanted here. I want to say that after so many moral dilemmas, so many foiled plans, so many uncomfortable realisations, he finally managed to get his revenge on this despicable man – _revenge_ of course, as I now know, meaning _I wish he had got the chance to kill Count Olaf at this point_. It is a terrible thing, to wish someone dead, especially when you are the one contemplating doing it, but after everything that had happened and everything Olaf had done, and would continue to do, I don’t feel as bad as I perhaps should for wishing this. Perhaps Lemony wanted to go through with such a thing, perhaps he would have done so and found out that he didn’t, or perhaps it would have been somewhat of a mixed bag. I am not sure, and he will never find out. What he could have done was quickly, while Olaf was distracted by Esmé, grab him and throw him over four storeys to his almost certain death, but something somewhere must have held him back. He did push Olaf, and Olaf did stumble and slip and fall over the edge, but it wasn’t quite hard enough, not quite far enough from the scaffolding, and Olaf managed to grab on at the last moment and dangle there, arms supporting himself, for the briefest moment looking perhaps afraid. Lemony stepped closer, knowing all it would take would be a couple of sharp jabs on Olaf’s hands with his heel, and that would be the end of it. 

He almost did; he got so impossibly, infuriatingly close – close enough to later live with the knowledge that yes, he would have done it; that yes, he would have killed a man in cold blood and lived with it, and Olaf seemed to realise the same thing, because he reached out and grabbed Lemony’s leg with unexpected strength, hands curling around his ankle.

“Do you think this is what your noble brother would have wanted?” he asked, and Lemony felt him squeeze his ankle, right above the tattoo. For a moment he couldn’t think. “Do you think this is what he would want done in his name? Throwing a man off the side of a building? Shouldn’t you be bringing me in instead? Letting the _law_ deal with it?”

“He’s not here,” Lemony said, through clenched teeth. 

“No,” Olaf said quietly, “and this won’t change that.”

He pulled hard at Lemony’s leg, enough to make him stumble but not enough to make him fall. He had no choice but to step back, heels over the edge of the gap behind him, and as Olaf began to quickly pull himself back over the edge of the scaffolding Lemony had just enough time to hear a shuffle from above him. He looked up, briefly catching Esmé’s cruel smile, and then something heavy cracked him across the back of the head and he went down, landing only just on the platform. 

“Oopsie!” Esmé called. “Sorry!”

She did not sound sorry at all. Olaf scrambled back onto the scaffolding, slightly out of breath and once again bleeding heavily from his hand.

“Well that was unexpected,” he said, standing up. “What was that?”

“Oh, it was some old… thing up here. I don’t know. Part of the scaffolding, I think. It was heavy, that’s all that matters.”

“Looks like these Snickets should be a little more careful about _falling objects,_ ” Olaf said, smiling. Lemony could just about make him out, standing above him. “Let’s see how you get out of this one. You might have escaped the fire, unlike some unfortunate people we know, but I don’t see any _functional dragonfly wings._ ”

He rolled his eyes as he said the words, crossing his arms and briefly regarding Lemony with an annoyed look. Through the pain in his head and the daze the blow had brought down on him Lemony vaguely thought he should try and get away, but it was far to late for that. With a single hard kick Olaf had pushed him the rest of the way over the edge, and then there was nothing but black and wind rushing around him and the sure thought that this was it. 

Scaffolding is a very dangerous place to be, and not just when you are falling from it. There are many dangers even when you are already falling, such as things to catch yourself on or crash into. The dilapidated scaffolding at Heimlich Hospital was no exception, but here we are again with these variables: this time if was Count Olaf’s simple plan that failed, though he would not know it. 

As Lemony fell, the handcuffs, still fasted around one wrist, caught on a metal pipe sticking out from one of the walkways. The empty cuff managed to briefly encircle this pipe, wrenching Lemony to an almost stop before the joining chain, weakened by Lemony’s earlier escape, buckled under the sudden weight and snapped, sending Lemony crashing the rest of the way to the floor, along with several displaced planks from the walkway he had caught on. It was not much – only a split second – but this delay was the one thing that undoubtedly saved his life. Instead of crashing into the ground at speed, likely landing on his back and suffering catastrophic injuries, the interruption slowed him and threw off his trajectory, resulting in him hitting the ground at a much lower speed and at an angle, causing him to roll instead. He was badly bruised by the impact but not otherwise injured by that part of it, and the impossibly loud sound of the wooden planks hitting the ground with a large thump would have been more than enough to convince his would-be murderers that he had hit the ground both hard and fatally. Should they have looked over the edge, which they might have done, they would have seen Lemony quite motionless. 

He was alive, though – but, I am sorry to say, not without injury. The landing had not hurt him badly but the fall had, or rather, what had happened during the fall. The force from a falling body being suddenly redirected into a single limb is always going to be bad, and Lemony’s arm proved this theory. It was, as he later found out, dislocated at the shoulder and badly broken between the shoulder and elbow, and it took him several weeks of recuperation staying with me before the arm began to heal. He was also bleeding quite heavily at the wrist, as the handcuff had dug in and removed quite a chunk of skin, already weakened from being burned. 

Impossibly, it was not this he was thinking about as he lay on the ground, catching his breath and trying to work through the pain. It was not the pain of his wrist, or his arm, or his shoulder, or his head, or the tickling in his throat and the ache in his lungs and the prickle of the burns on his exposed skin. All of that was far from his mind. What hurt him the most was to know that it had all been for nothing – and not only that, but it had never been for anything at all.


	13. Chapter 13

I write this epilogue several months after the events described. The previous months were spent finalising my research and, upon my discovery of Lemony’s apparent fate, finding him to offer my assistance, which he accepted after no small amount of persuasion. We do not talk much about the events, even though he knows I know, and indeed he has now seen all of these documents and commended me on both my accuracy and my succinct description of an overhead projector. As with many things between us I did not expect us to ever discuss it again, and in a way, we didn’t. Not directly, anyway. 

I found myself meeting with Lemony shortly after his arm had healed enough that it was no longer a complete liability to him, though it was still supported in a sling. His wrist will forever show a large, white scar from the burn and unseen under his hair at the back of his head is a small scar from whatever it was that Esmé struck him with. He was not the only person who looked as though he had been through something painful, because as I joined him where he was sitting in the shade I spotted another man limping on crutches, and a young woman humming to herself as she wheeled herself along the path. 

Lemony and I sat in silence for some time before I dared to ask the only question I have ever brought up about the topic.

“Are you going to try again?”

I was worried, I admit, that he might attempt to catch up with Olaf, and that he might endeavour to be successful this time, and if he wasn’t that he might try again and again and again, a series of fruitless schemes building up to something that could only be a disappointment. It reminded me uncomfortable of Olaf himself, blinded by greed and obsessed with fortune, chasing the Baudelaire orphans across hundreds and miles and dozens of failed plans, rather than directing his admitted talents in disguise and persuasion to something that might see him fare better: acting in decent plays, perhaps. 

Thankfully, Lemony shook his head. “No. I think I’m quite done with this. I’m sure you could say I’ve learned my lesson.”

I didn’t know what lesson he meant. The lesson that revenge is never how we imagine it? The realisation that there is a fine line between being a good person and being a sometimes-good person and being a bad person sometimes out of necessity and being a villain? That this would not have been the end that Jacques wanted for him? That Olaf was, in some respects, right – that these were not the actions Jacques would have wanted done in his name?

I didn’t have to ask, because surprisingly Lemony elaborated on his own. 

“It was a selfish act,” he said, looking at something behind me I couldn’t see. Whatever it was, it was moving; I could see his eyes flickering slightly as he watched. “I don’t know what came over me. I can’t possibly have thought it would make anything better.”

“You must have,” I replied. “At some point.”

“To be honest with you I don’t think I was thinking at all. I think I just acted. There was no logic to it.”

“You were upset,” I said cautiously, “and rightfully so. You told me once that people will do anything they can to make something seem right, or fair.”

“I suppose I didn’t consider that such a thing could be included.”

“You had no reason to know.”

“I have lost people before, Despard,” Lemony said slowly, carefully, “in many different ways. And I have never done that.”

“It’s your _brother_ ,” I said, and for a moment we were silent. 

“It was Olaf, who first articulated it,” Lemony eventually said, still staring at something in the distance. “That it wouldn’t be what Jacques wanted. I had had inklings before but it was the first time I had to actually think about it, and I found he was right. He said that Jacques wouldn’t want such a thing done in his name, and I said that he wasn’t here anymore, implying it didn’t matter. I don’t know what possessed me to say such a thing.”

“It’s a complicated situation.”

“But it doesn’t change that fact that he is here. Not in the same way, but he isn’t gone. Perhaps if he had died I would be able to draw a line in the sand – by which I mean close that chapter of my life, and by that I mean I would be able to find some closure as the grieving process would be the expected one for the situation. This is something else entirely.”

“Do you think he’ll…?” I couldn’t think of the words to delicately finish the sentence. Everything sounded wrong or offensive, and I had never been in such a situation before.

“The doctors think it unlikely,” Lemony said, his voice slightly strained, and then he cleared his throat. “But that doesn’t mean impossible. And even if he doesn’t… it’s still him. Somewhere in there, it’s still him. To think that I almost forgot that simply because it wasn’t what I remember, and I was angry.”

He shook his head and I tried for a moment to work out just how confusing it must be for him. I found I couldn’t. I simply had no frame of reference. I wanted to ask what he meant when he said that Jacques was still there, somewhere, but as it turned out I got my answer with a soft tug on my collar. 

Jacques was standing behind me, looking older but not all that different to how I remembered him. The main difference was that his hair was still very short, the many scars still healing. He was always smiling these days but it had a slightly distant look to it, as though he didn’t entirely comprehend what was going on. This was probably not far from the truth, seems Jacques now had a much lower mental age and things were often beyond his comprehension. I could see what Lemony meant, though – Jacques always approached things with good humour and unstoppable curiosity, very much like how he had always been. I could see why there was guilt etched onto Lemony’s face when he spoke of claiming that Jacques was no longer there. 

“Hello, Jacques,” I said, wondering how long it had been since I had last seen him. “How do you do?”

He didn’t speak much these days, but his smile brightened a little, and I found myself oddly touched. 

“What’s this?” I asked, as he held out his hand. When I reached out he pressed several small, bright flowers into my hand, slightly crumpled but no less beautiful for it. I looked at them, feeling suddenly emotional, and then looked back at Jacques. “Thank you, Jacques. These are lovely.”

“I’ll come see all of them in a moment, Jacques,” Lemony said, as his brother looked at him. His tone was the gentlest I’d ever heard it, not like he was speaking to a child but more like he was speaking with unending patience, and the kind of love that comes from being so close to being possessed by something so much worse. Not like he was trying to make up for it, no, but more like he had realised what he would have missed out on. 

Jacques beamed at us both and then wandered away, leisurely making his way back up the path.

“He’ll be alright?” I asked Lemony, who nodded.

“It’s safe here. He’s well looked after.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.

“He remembered,” Lemony said slowly, “that you were coming. I told him. He remembered you’re my friend, and he brought you a gift.”

I looked at the flowers again giving a small smile. “He did.”

“And I said—” Lemony began angrily, before he broke off and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I was wrong, but I didn’t get to act on it. I tried, but I didn’t.”

“Perhaps that’s for the best.”

“I think it is.” He frowned for a moment, before making a conscious effort to relax the tension in his shoulders. “Even if he was dead I think it would have been for the best. He wouldn’t have wanted that. And perhaps I’m worried that if I had done it, he would have sensed something in me. Something that had changed. He always believed the best in me.”

Lemony’s eyes flickered past me again, in the direction his brother had gone.

“He always believed the best in everyone.”


End file.
